FEATURES AND BENEFITS

The Sales and Distribution Analysis Starter Kit is organized around five main reporting areas aligned with the various stages of the sales and distribution business process. Reporting areas are further organized into subject areas with reports grouped by type of analysis. Each reporting area includes a number of predefined best-practices reports. The analysis areas are:

1. Inquiry Analysis - Reports help analyze the initial stage of the business process, measuring inquiry activity through the organization, material and customer base.
2. Quotation Analysis - Reports are focused on quotation processing, including measuring activity based on different business dimensions and inquiries-to-quotations conversions.
3. Sales Order Analysis - Reports help analyze sales transactions from various points of view, includes measuring overall activity, performing sales analysis by customer segments, understanding materials sales, and measuring quotation-to-sales conversions.
4. Delivery Analysis - Reports provide insight into how goods get delivered to customers through tracking of open deliveries and analyzing delivery activity and processing times.
5. Sales and Delivery Service Analysis - Reports are focused on all the service-related activities around the fulfillment of sales and delivery, such as analyzing backlog, quality of delivery service and returns.

The Sales and Distribution Analysis Starter Kit allows users to analyze sales and deliver information down to the lowest level of detail and up to the highest level summarized along multiple analysis dimensions.

For example, executives can obtain a summary of sales activity by company and year, while operational users can track individual transactions and identify the corresponding customer, materials and processing dates assigned to the transaction.

Key features with regards to the data are:

• Data Breath - Sales and Distribution analysis is architected for all pre-sales, sales, post-sales and delivery activities covering the complete sales and distribution business process.
• Data Depth - Built on the MicroStrategy BI platform, the module tracks activity at the lowest transaction level, providing the item detail for each transaction.
• Modularity - The module may be divided into two main areas, namely: pre-sales and post-sales. The two areas are architected to be independent of each other and may be implemented separately based on an organization's analytical needs. Further, all reporting areas are aligned with corresponding business processes, requiring that just the relevant analysis area be implemented to take full advantages of predefined reports.
• Portability - The module is designed to be independent from data structures. The entire multidimensional model and reports can work with the default data schema provided or with any other physical schema containing the same or similar data elements.
• Analysis Dimensions - The module ships with a number of dimensions through which data can be viewed and analyzed, such as organization, material, time, customer, etc. Default analysis dimensions can be easily customized and extended to support analysis structures required for each organization.

The Sales and Distribution Analysis Starter Kit built on the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform provides nicely formatted and analytically rich reporting.

• Reporting Flexibility - Dynamic prompts allow end users to define report templates on the fly and select filter conditions to be used at run-time.
• Rich Formatting - Reports make use of MicroStrategy's advanced formatting features, such as thresholding, stop-lighting and page-by to highlight trends and present consumable information in both grid and graph formats.
• Advanced Metrics - Sophisticated measures, such as historical trends (e.g., comparing sales activity current month vs. last month), or contributions (e.g., measuring weight of a particular material division to the overall material sales) provide deeper insight.
• Segmentation Capabilities - End users can define sets of elements that meet certain conditions to create specific segments.
• Ad-Hoc Analysis - End users can create additional reports based on existing attributes and metrics or create new ones to address specific reporting needs.
• Scorecards - End users can create business scorecards combining information from different analysis areas.
• Advanced Drilling - End users can navigate from high-level summarized information to transactional details as desired.