After speaking before thousands of inquisitive minds, and talking with thousands of customers, there are only two things I can say with 100% certainty:
And after every product rollout, or marketing promise made by some Business Intelligence Application, invariably the question arises "Is this the one tool I can use for everything?". Of course, the answer is always no, but no such tool exists - and won't for many, many years.
If there were a perfect world, your Business Intelligence Application would be a blank canvas, and you would just place fields on it in any fashion you wanted, and viola! instant analytics!
But there are three big problems.
The first problem is the underlying data. In order to get information that helps you run your business, the following premises have to be met.
Let's look at a simple example. If a data field stands for "yes" or "no", it has to be consistent e.g. is it "N" or "no" or "NO"? A more complicated example would be how somebody might define "machinery" for job costing. Is it an account? multiple accounts? A particular item? used in the description of an item? Is the item unique?
Granted, once you nail the definition down, you can graduate to the analytic creation, but there are usually more than just one of these "gotchas" when creating a report or analysis.
The second problem is how the data pieces are all tied together. This is more a matter of benign ignorance than anything else, yet most Business Intelligence or Reporting Tools expect you to be more knowledgeable about data and warehousing than you should ever be.
Data modeling requires an intricate knowledge of the underlying database, and even for people who work in those databases, it is a difficult undertaking - never mind the poor end user.
A good example of this would be Time Tracking and Payroll in QuickBooks. Since users can create a Payroll from the Time Tracking activity, many expect that there is link between the two transactions; but there isn't. First, you can change - after the fact - either the Paycheck or Time Tracking entry, without changing to other. Second QuickBooks doesn't store any link.
Now, let's be realistic - how many QuickBooks users would know that? Not many.
The third problem is that some people want to see the traditional rows and reports, others want ot analyze data on the fly, and still others just want a simple piece of visualization on their mobile device.
Again there is no one tool that can do all of these things. Crystal Reports is still the king of reporting writing for pinpoint layers - even after 30 years. Nothing beats Excel PivotTables for on the fly analysis, and tools like Tableau and Microsoft PowerBI take visualization to a whole new level.
So our main takeaway becomes:
Reporting is more of an art than it is a science
QQube takes care of the first two problems, and creates the necessary data modeling for you, so that all you have to focus on, is the actual report creation. It also assists with the third problem, because the same data can be used out of the box for any type of application, whether it is a traditional report writer or visualization tool.
Of course, you will still be disappointed that your employees have been entering data in a particular field in all sorts of ways, and that Payroll and Time Tracking are not tied together - but your expectations will be enhanced because of your education.
Over the past two decades CLEARIFY® and its Solution Provider network have created thousands of custom reports, and have used the following guidelines for success:
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