Following up on recent migrations from minilang to groovy regarding the
functions in the BI component I have made various enhancements to the
component, enabling the project to move from a Proof of Concept state to
something that is starting to provide our (potential) adopters some
additional arguments to use (or select) our product.
BI (or Business Intelligence) is a key factor to measure the success of a
company (and its underlying departments), whether it is regarding sales,
purchases, inventory ageing, or employer utilisation (e.g. in
project-oriented service orgs). BI often works against a Data Warehouse,
which is fed from the transactions RDBMS using (more or less) sophisticated
ETL solutions. Often these ETL tools are quite expensive to operate, and
require - when talking about development - quite the skill set.
Unfortunately, Small and Medium Enterprises often lack the budget to deploy
such tools and services and make due with exports from the transaction
RDBMS and the use of MS Excel to do their Business Intelligence analysis.
Given the unique feature set of OFBiz catering to the needs of small and
medium enterprises, an improved BI component can deliver on an easy (and
fairly cheap) means to have a DataWarehouse populated, and - through the
population of dimension and fact tables - get data elements combined into
star schemas for in-component or external (through external tools as Excel)
analysis.
In order to bring the BI component up to a level of usability in a company,
I have implemented following changes (in a feature branch in my repo)
- added and updated dimension tables
- CustomerDimension, OrganisationDimension (internal organisations),
and SupplierDimension
- supporting: DateDimension, TimeDimension, CountryDimension,
CurrencyDimension
- updated fact tables to work with the added and improved dimension
tables
- SalesInvoiceItemFact
- InventoryItemFact
- updated star schemas to bring data elements from dimension and fact
tables together
- SalesInvoiceItemStarSchema
- InventoryItemStarSchema
- made the Report Builder functionality (screens and such) mode user
friendly, by applying ajax functionality, to have selection of the star
schema, the field selection and the resulting overview in one page
While there are still a lot of areas (BI-wise) that can be improved, such
as:
- SalesOrderItemFact and SalesOrderItemStarSchema - to enhance the
analysis regarding sales,
- Purchase (Spend) analysis functionality,
- Utilisation analysis function (assets, employee),
enhancements currently available improve the BI component significantly.
Rather than working alone and see contributions go stale, I would like to
collaborate more via a feature branch in the official plugins repository.
As you can see in JIRA, there already quite a number of improvement tickets
(seeu [1]), and I have already many (up to the point of ready for
incorporation into the plugins code base) in progress. The improvements
are currently available in my public fork on Github (see [2]). I invite you
to fork or clone and test-drive the enhancements.
And if you have any suggestions, questions, and/or remarks, feel free to
post them here (or directly to me), or as a comment to the master ticket
(for general aspects) or to a particular sub-task.
1. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-11414
2.
https://github.com/PierreSmits/plugins/tree/OFBIZ-11414_BI-Improvements
Looking forward.
Met vriendelijke groet,
Pierre Smits
*Proud* *contributor** of* Apache OFBiz <https://ofbiz.apache.org/> since
2008 (without privileges)
*Apache Trafodion <https://trafodion.apache.org>, Vice President*
*Apache Directory <https://directory.apache.org>, PMC Member*
Apache Incubator <https://incubator.apache.org>, committer
Apache Steve <https://steve.apache.org>, committer
