We Do It Every Day: A Typical Web Query

In this section:

Suppose that you own a small business in New York and are exploring a partnership with a company in Oakland, California. You need to get to a Monday morning meeting. How do you go about arranging your flight?

Most likely, you go online.

First, you check available flights on the airline that holds your frequent flyer miles. You discover that your frequent flyer carrier requires a change of planes and you would prefer a direct flight, so you look at routes and fares for other airlines.

In New York, you can get to LaGuardia, JFK, and Long Island MacArthur Airport. In California, you can fly into Oakland or San Francisco.

While you would prefer to fly out on Sunday and return Tuesday morning, you could consider a Saturday flight to California and a return flight on the red-eye Monday night, if fares and schedules are better.

You begin your search by airline and then look at options for each departure point and destination by day, time, and price.

Another approach is to start with an online consolidator, enter the times you can fly, and see what flights and fares are available.

There are a lot of variables to play with, but in a half hour, you have done your research and can make a good decision based on all available factors.

The websites you access are designed to facilitate your queries. Various menus and selection panes make it easy to pursue each line of inquiry. Required and optional information is identified for you. You can move forward down a path of choices, backtrack and start down a different path, or resume the original path with different selections.

You need to keep track of the question you want to answer, but a well-designed site makes your investigation easy. For most of us, this process has become intuitive.

The same process works when analyzing the data in an OLAP-enabled report.

Running OLAP Examples

You can run all of the examples in this chapter using OLAP-enabled published content. If the reports are not already available in your sample repository, ask your administrator to provide them for your use. There are nine reports, named olaprep1.fex through olaprep9.fex, located on the TIBCO WebFOCUS® Reporting Server in the \ibinccen demo directory.

Each example indicates which published content to run. After the report appears in your browser, you can perform the analytic task shown, or pursue your own line of inquiry.

Suppose that you are an analyst for Century Corporation, which manufactures electronics equipment. You need to determine which of the stores that sells your products had the highest sales in 2002, and whether there is a pattern in sales periods and/or best selling products that should be considered when planning manufacturing schedules and parts inventories.

You have created a base report that shows sales data only for 2002. You have also OLAP enabled the report to permit quick analysis of the data.

  1. Run OLAPREP1.

    Before you begin your analysis, the OLAP report looks like the following image.


    Report 1 main screen

    The quarterly information is spread out over the left-most column. You can try a horizontal display to make comparison easier.

  2. Drag QUARTER above the report.

    The report changes immediately and appears, as shown in the following image, across the top of the report with the Quantity and Line Cost of Goods Sold columns repeating for each quarter.


    Report 1 Quarter

    The store information is more compact, but it is not easier to identify the store with the best sales record, so drag QUARTER back to its original position.

  3. Right-click Line Cost of Goods Sold and choose Visualize. This applies a data visualization bar graph to each value in the column.

    Note: The options available may vary, depending on your OLAP format settings.

    The display changes, as shown in the following image.



    The bar graphs still do not reveal a trend.

  4. Sort the data by highest value by either right-clicking Line Cost of Goods Sold and choosing Sort by Highest, or clicking the Up arrow next to Line Cost of Goods Sold.

    As shown in the following image, the report shows that Audio Expert has the highest sales in the digital product lines in Quarters 1 and 2, with eMart trailing slightly. Each value under the QUARTER, Store Name, and Product Type column is hyperlinked for more details.


    Report 1 visualized bar chart, sorted highest

  5. Click Q2 to check the monthly breakdown.

    In the monthly report, both stores recorded their highest sales in June (06), as shown in the following image.


    Report 1, Q2

  6. Click Audio Expert on the top line, next to MONTH 06. This filters out the other stores, showing a breakdown of Audio Expert June sales, as shown in the following image.

    Audio Expert June sales

    You now see information for digital and analog sales at Audio Expert. Since the significant sales for Audio Expert are in the digital area, let us see which digital products contributed to the June figures.

  7. Click Digital.

    The breakdown shows clearly that PDAs drove Audio Expert digital sales.


    Report 1 digital sales

  8. Click PDA Devices to see the details.

    As shown in the following image, ZT Digital PDA - Commercial was by far the top selling PDA in June for Audio Expert.


    Report 1 PDA detail

    Let us now see what drove digital sales at eMart, the second highest producer.

  9. Click Back in your browser until you return to the following window, showing second-quarter sales for all stores.

    Report 1 Q2

  10. This time, click eMart next to MONTH 06, to see the June sales information for eMart.

    Once again, the Digital category leads sales, as shown in the following image.


    Report 1 eMart

  11. Click Digital.

    PDA is the strong seller for eMart too, as shown in the following image.


    Report 1 eMart digital sales

  12. Click PDA Devices to examine the models that compose these sales.

    The report shows sales figures for the two PDA models, as shown in the following image.


    Report 1 eMart PDA sales

    ZT Digital PDA - Commercial far outsells ZC Digital PDA - Standard.

    This information from the two top selling stores suggests that Century Corporation should evaluate and adjust available parts inventories for each model and consider shifting production schedules of plants to produce more Commercial units.

    You have done all of your data manipulation from the report. But, because of the options you selected when OLAP-enabling this report, it is easy to expose the OLAP Selections panel where you can review the selections that are currently in effect, and make additional selections if you like. For details on OLAP set-up options, see OLAP-Enabling a Report.

  13. To expose the OLAP Selections panel, right-click Product Name and select Show Panel from the menu.

    Note: The options available may vary, depending on your OLAP format settings.

    The Selections panel appears above the report, as shown in the following image.


    Report 1 Selections pane

    Notice that Store Name is eMart, Product Type is Digital, and Product Category is PDA Devices.