Nextanalytics is able to calculate targets using business rules.  Once the set of targets is established, Nextanalytics can show the values in a crosstab as comparisons to the targets.

This example is a demonstration of those capabilities.

Nextanalytics starts with a query to the database to get the counts of email attributes e.g. sent, opened, clicked and others (as shown below).

Nextanalytics creates a crosstab by swapping the attribute to the columns. (for more info on why this is cool, click here)

By adding Nextanalytics adds Alerts to the crosstab, we can easily see which values are above or below the row average. (green is good, red is bad) 

In a two step operation, Nextanalytics can now do the following:

1. calculate all numbers to being a percentage of the top row "Sent".
2. calculate the life-to-date summary values:  Average, Median and Variance (StdDev) of each row.  

The result is a page of target values and variances.

The following crosstab shows the percentage of emails Sent. 

This crosstab is color coded by whether or not it is higher or lower than the target value plus or minus 15%. The target value was dynamically arrived at by calculating the life-to-date average for each row.

This examples the power of Nextanalytics because it was a multi-step process and yet only one query was issued, and there was no need for a cube to be created, no intermediate tables, and no complicated queries.  Even doing this in Excel would have been days of work, compared to the minutes of work in Nextanalytics.