Analytic reporting facilitates the analysis of information.  While enterprise reporting is designed for information distribution to targeted users with standardized needs sometimes this is not enough. Other groups, specifically those with decision making responsibility, need a much deeper understanding to make the proper decisions. These groups need to gain quick insight to the ‘’why’’ and ‘’how’’ behind the numbers presented in a report. Exploration of information, , dimensional analysis trend analysis, and root- cause analysis are all factors that facilitate the exploration of data that lead to better decisions.

Intellicom provides these analytic reporting capabilities under a unified framework, allowing corporations to standardize on a single reporting solution. This provides an organization with the perfect combination of data delivery and the necessary tools to understand information.

Root- cause analysis
This is used to determine what factors a driving a specific number. A summary report showing a decrease in gross margin revenues requires further investigation to get to the underlying detail causing this issue. Many factors may be responsible for such an issue all underlying in different data sources. For example maybe the revenues data located within companies ERP may cause these issues or maybe an increase in material costs stored within a SCM system is the root cause. Through the use of navigation paths users can quickly navigate and view relevant information via simple menu items with a click of the mouse. Navigation paths are not associated with data sources so they can be set up to explore and relate data in disparate repositories.

Dimensional analysis
Traditional reports are generated using a 2 dimensional approach using rows and columns to deliver information. Dimensional analysis allows business data to be viewed dynamically from a variety of different business perspectives. Dimensions provide a business oriented view of data that is more easily comprehended by end users. Entities such as Products, Geography, Employees and Time are all Dimensions that cover some aspects of organizational structure. The power of dimensional analysis comes from combining dimensions to analyse the relationships between different aspects of the business and discover important information. Dimensions can have multiple levels to allow analysis at different aggregations of data. For example, the Product Dimension can be aggregated to Products categories, types etc. The key advantage of dimensional reporting is that end users do not need to predefine any particular way of viewing information. They can use all of the dimensions and switch easily from one to the other
Administrators can easily set up dimensional views of information that are made available to und users. Further more report users can easily switch to dimensional analysis from operational reports from within the same environment and crate ad hoc dimensional reports according to there individual needs.

Trend analysis
It is important to detect the variations of numerical data in context with historical data over time periods. This is further needed to understand change in accordance to a time series and understand where the numbers are going. For example a sales manager detects a sales increase in the Q4 revenue and needs to see the correspondent revenue for the same period for multiple historical years. The sales manager also needs variation indicators showing the percentage increase that will help to better understand if this is a trend , a seasonal variation or an exception. Finally he needs to also see the actual product sales on a per unit basis next to the actual dollar amount so he can detect if the increase is due to actual product sales or due to prices increases.
Time series reports can easily be set up by report authors using simple business terms (such as establishing the variation of a time series element in accordance to a base line period). Further more the information delivered within a report can come from multiple data sources and delivered to end users in a unified fashion.