Nextanalytics lets you dynamically create and maintain content for your dashboards. This lets you evolve your metrics and KPIs as your business needs change without impact on your IT budget. We’re going to demonstrate how to populate our Open Source Dashboard with metrics that you can custom design for your own needs.

First, load your data Nextanalytics can work with any data; it typically consists of text values like products, customers, sales-reps, locations, business units, activity and processes, as well as numeric values like cost, quantity, unit-price, and actual sales amounts. We start by getting raw data from the database. To do this, we use a predefined SQL query, supplied by our database administrator. This allows us to extract the database records we will use to generate the dashboard charts and tables. Because we are performing our own analytics, the query does not have to be complicated and is probably already used for an operational report, delivering a simple summary of the transactional data.

Create a crosstab for the chart

In order to display the information in a chart, it needs to be transformed into a matrix or crosstab format. In Excel, this would be referred to as a pivot operation. With Nextanalytics, we simply select the column and aggregation desired, and we get our crosstab, complete with a count of the number of transactions that were combined to form each row.

Prepare for publishing

We can just as easily remove the Count column, assign an appropriate title and select a chart type. The final step is to hide all the previous pages and save the workflow to a disk file.

When we go back to the dashboard and refresh the browser, we'll see our report. Whenever the data changes, you'll see the fresh results.

APPENDIX - Technical Notes

As menu selections were made, Nextanalytics recorded the operations in a simple script file that a technical analyst can easily interpret, modify or re-use. These workflows can also be parameterized, allowing them to change on-the-fly from a dashboard or a batch process.

APPENDIX - Explore Using Iterative Analytics

With Nextanalytics, the results of each operation are immediately ready for the next, providing incredible flexibility when combining analytic operations such as:

• Filter (remove rows) based on values in any time periods,
• Filter by values in text columns
• Combine rows and columns
• Ranks
• Variances
• Fractiles
• Comparisons
• Repeating calculations: net change, percent-of, growth, and acceleration
• Joiners and leavers
• Changing the order of columns
• Exception highlighting
• Calculations
• Test

Iterative analytics allows these operations to be performed repeatedly and in succession. The result of each step becomes the input for the next.