Business Intelligence (BI) FAQs
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- Why do I get a "restricted Page" when I click on or select a Business Intelligence page?
- I want to compare Sales Revenue for this quarter with the same quarter of the previous year, how can I do this?
- What kinds of business-related questions can I answer within BI?
- How are the BI KPIs/Measures and Charts generated
- Can I customise the tile layout based on my preference?
- Why is BI showing different values than my reports?
Why do I get a "Restricted Page" when I click on or select a Business Intelligence page?
Permissions for your user role needs to be updated by your superuser or account owner. Navigate to Role Permissions: Settings > Security > Role Permissions. Select the relevant role and under Business Intelligence, permissions can be set per context and per tier (BI Foundation / BI Vision).
Based on your Permissions the Dashboard and side menu bar will only display BI and KPIs if permission has been set for your role.
I want to compare Sales Revenue for this quarter with the same quarter of the previous year, how can I do this?
Go to the Vision tab on the BI Sales page. On the top right-hand corner select, Custom from the dropdown. Now select the From and To dates. Say the current period is April 1, 2022 to June 30, 2022, then click on the Apply button. The system will use this period and calculate the prior period which will be the same date range but just for the previous year April 1, 2021 to June 30, 2021.
This custom date range can also be used on the Vision Customers, Purchases, and Production pages.
What kinds of business-related questions can I answer with BI Foundation or BI Vision?
Purchases
- Show me how many Purchase Orders we created for the period selected? (We may want to raise with supplier, and potentially consolidate orders to reduce cost.)
- Do we have Purchase Orders in an Open status for more than 90 days? (We may want to raise this with suppliers, and check it with the suppliers lead times.)
Inventory
- Show me the total value of the current open purchase orders and which product groups/products these relate to? (We may want to raise this with the supplier, is there a wider issue here?)
- Which products are taking me the longest to sell (Average Days to Sell)? (Is it worth keeping them in stock? costing more to store than making money)
- Why is the stock adjustment count so high in the Ipswich warehouse? (Are they doing something different to the others? Is this being stolen or lost?)
- How did my stock on hand value change over the latest period (up to 12 months), do I have more capital locked in Stock on the shelve?
- Which products are "old" stock (Identify these to do a flash sale or do a promotion to customers.)
Production/Assemblies
- What were the value and quantity of assemblies we did for the period selected? Were they on-time or late?
- Which Products did we assemble the most of?
- Which Assembled Products had the biggest wastage for the period selected?
- Which components did we use the most during assemblies for the period selected?
- Did we manage to improve the cost-effectiveness of our assemblies? Did the average cost per unit increase or decrease per product assembled?
- What is the cost of assemblies for the period selected and how does it compare to the previous period?
Sales
- Show the comparison between Current and Prior periods, are Sales improving or decreasing?
- Show me the product that brings in the biggest gross profit %, and who is the salesperson that sells that product? (May want to incentivize this insight)
- Show me the average revenue per order by salesperson? (Is there something they’re doing differently from the rest of the team?)
- Gross profit by product group (Which channel do we do best for this? Can we allocate more cost to marketing in this area?)
- With the Transaction type dimension, easily identify the value and portion of Sales Revenue related to Charges and Credits.
- Add annual Sales targets for Sales Revenue, Gross Profit, and Gross Profit percentage and monitor achievements through automated email notifications
- Set up notification rules to give you Top 5 Customers and Top 5 Products based on Sales Revenue.
Customers
- How many active customers - quarter on quarter (Is this growing? Why are other customers not active, which of my salespeople have the most active customers, which Sales Channels drives this?)
- What is my average revenue per customer? (How do we boost this? Any short-term plans in place?)
How are the BI KPIs/measures and charts generated?
BI KPIs and charts are generated by calculating values from your Purchases, Inventory, Production/Assemblies, Sales, and Customers in Unleashed. There is an automated process (ETL) that extracts all transactions from your Unleashed database every hour to populate the values. Different formulas are applied per tile and results are reflected on the KPIs and charts on BI pages.
Can I customise the tile layout based on my preference?
Yes you can if you are a BI Vision subscriber. At the top of the page next to the date selection you will find a dropdown field to create up to 3 different layouts for the page. These layouts are private to each user and you have the option to make it your default for the page.
Why is BI showing different values than my reports?
There is a chance that BI KPI values may not be in sync with the Unleashed reports you generate. This is because the BI module takes a snapshot of your Unleashed records at a given time (on the hour), processes the data from the snapshot, and calculates summaries.
It could happen that new transactions have come in while the earlier snapshot is being processed. This should not deter you from using BI as snapshots are taken regularly and processed accordingly.
We aim to refresh all values and graphs every hour, directly from your Unleashed database, no need to refresh or reload data, and the values are displayed in your organization’s base currency.
We display a date-time stamp at the top of each BI page to indicate the last transaction in Unleashed related to values displayed on the selected BI page, also when the latest data refresh occurred. The "Last transaction date and time" is per context page therefore could be different as the scheduled refresh for the BI Inventory page is every 4 hours for none-BI Vision subscribers, and hourly for BI Vision subscribers. The other context pages (Purchases, Production, Sales, and Customers) should all refresh every hour.
For example, the new Dashboard will display the last transaction across all contexts plus the duration since the last refresh.
Follow this link to view BI KPIs with tooltips and calculations.