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Types of Reporting

Organizations generally require two types of information. One is fixed format reporting (Sage Intelligence Reporting Standard Report Templates), and the other is analysis (OLAP Module). The former requires information to be presented neatly, formatted and presentable. This is applicable for financial reporting, board packs, management dashboards, or similar fixed format intelligence. The latter is less presentable, but contains rich information that can be analyzed in various ways to establish trends and statistics which may not become instantly apparent in the fixed format reporting.

As the diagram above illustrates, the best approach for BI for SMME’s lies somewhere between OLAP and Reporting. OLAP should most commonly deal with greater volumes of data than a fixed format report. An OLAP tool should be able to trump its closely related fixed format reporting cousin in its ability to deliver multi-dimensional (as opposed to a single “flat sheet” dimension), analysis graphing, charting and more.