Solution: Set a manual calculated maximum

{ =IF(MAX(AE15:AE26)<100,100,MAX(AE15:AE26)) } and then set the division number to 1.  With the division number to 1, it often also looks better to remove the grid lines (in case the data for the charts sometimes is much higher).

  Problem B:  I want to display a line chart on top of a stacked bar chart because there is no combination chart with this option.  My data for the stacked bar chart, however, is sometimes over 100 and sometimes under 100 and the extra space shifts the chart so that the two do not align.  How can I make the layered charts always align? 

 (Layered line chart does not line up with stacked bar chart when maximum is less than 100)

 (Layered line chart lines up with stacked bar chart when the maximum is over 100)

Note: If the charts are less than a magnitude different, the following method is a not-so-elegant-but-perhaps-acceptable workaround.  In the example above, I have emphasized the issue of alignment by making the different much greater in which case a more-involved display control of multiple charts may be the only acceptable option. 

Solution: Set a manual calculated maximum within an if() statement so that the maximum is always 100 or greater even if the stacked bar chart total is less than 100. (See above note for exception) 

This “fix” may not be acceptable for the right visual consumption. What may need to be done when the data is more than a magnitude of 10 different is to work with display properties for two charts with different widths based upon the maximum chart height formula instead.

Some products have not only become defined by their name but have been so successful they end up defining all products of the same type like “Kleenex” and “Band-Aid” .  Others have found out that their product name can end up portraying the wrong image like Chevrolet’s Nova car – “No va” meaning “it doesn’t go” in Spanish! The French company Bull Computers also had a hard time with its “Bull” named products in North America.  However, Bull also launched a clever marketing campaign around the ambiguity of its name entitled “Know Bull” which did get some attention.

At this year’s Sapphire, Sir Richard Branson told this great story of how when he went to register the name “Virgin” for his company in the UK, the company registration official turned it down because they deemed the name as rude. So Branson returned the next day with a dictionary showing the definition of “virgin” as being pure and they accepted it.

So I have been somewhat intrigued about recent forum discussions surrounding SAP’s decision to rename Xcelsius – their amazing and very popular dashboard product.

Xcelsius already had some name recognition when Business Objects acquired Infommersion (the original developers) in November 2005 but then proceeded to rename it Crystal Xcelsius. This resulted in a lot of confusion as people started to relate the product to Crystal Reports and thought it was an add-on to this report writer product.  So when the next major release was developed, the decision was made to drop the Crystal name and so Xcelsius 2008 came to market.

For the last two years Xcelsius has become one of the most popular and prolifically used BI dashboard products in the marketplace and its name has become synonymous with data visualization and dynamic dashboards. 

So why would you take this very well known product with such a cool and catchy name as Xcelsius and rename it SAP Crystal Dashboard Design or SAP Enterprise Dashboard Design?

Well apparently this is because SAP uses a “master brand strategy” where SAP is the master brand and the product brand name takes a back seat. 

So why not SAP Xcelsius?

Well this is because SAP also uses “descriptive naming” for all its products so in the case of Xcelsius, the back seat has been completely removed!

Since “SAP Crystal Dashboard Design” is so long, it is bound to become abbreviated. However, I doubt this will be shortened to “SCDD” since a Google search points you to the “California State Council on Development Disabilities” .  It is more likely to become “Dashboard Design” since that is the new descriptive product name.  A Google search on “Dashboard Design” comes up with about 2.5 million results starting off with Qlikview, followed by Tableau Software then Corda and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design comes in at about number 14.  Interestingly, there is little ambiguity when you search on “Xcelsius”.

Translating Dashboard Design into other languages may also prove interesting.  Xcelsius will always translate into Xcelsius in all languages and I have a feeling the name will persist. At the end of the day, it is not just the name that counts, it’s the product itself. Xcelsius is as unique as a product as it is as a name. I will never forget that day in 2005 when I first saw it and was totally blown away. Infommersion created something truly amazing and ahead of its time. It remains top of its class and, for me, Xcelsius will always be Xcelsius.

IBIS 2010 Beach view

This year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) was just packed with high quality and in-depth boot camps and seminars covering Xcelsius, Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Data Services, BO XI 3.1 Administration and lots more. It was also located at the beautiful Ritz Carlton, Dana Point on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean which was the perfect remedy after a day of absorbing tons of knowledge.

The Welcome reception on Sunday night, entitled “Seeing Beyond Business Intelligence” was set in the Solutions Showcase area where sponsors demonstrated and discussed some of their latest business intelligence solutions.  I delivered the keynote the following morning on the same “Seeing Beyond” theme and highlighted some interesting business intelligence customer case studies.  The keynote on the Tuesday from Santiago Becerra, CEO of Mellmo, was quite fascinating as he took the audience through “the Evolution of Think” and cleverly demonstrated how putting fun into regular tasks can change people’s habits as well as their adoption of solutions. Showing Roambi, the latest business intelligence solution for the iPad, really brought the point home well.

The 2010 Best Xcelsius Awards demonstrated how far many companies have come in applying Xcelsius in very complex and powerful applications and inspired many others to go even further so I would watch out for next year’s awards.

I had the opportunity to meet with many people during the event and dive into some great discussions on both existing challenges in various BI implementations as well as future directions. In general, it appeared that most companies lag about 3 to 5 years behind the latest releases of SAP BusinessObjects and other BI solutions. Occasionally there is some critical new functionality that will compel a company to adopt a new release sooner but that tends to be the exception to the rule.  Many customers expressed that having reliability, stability and consistent performance are more important than most new functionality. Some of the newer solutions like Xcelsius dashboards and Roambi mobile business intelligence appear to circumnavigate this pattern since they can often be deployed and highly effective outside of the main business intelligence and production applications. A further big factor here is cost as many companies are more hesitant, due in part to the recent global recession, to spend large amounts of time and money on new software until they have conclusively proven a solid return on investment. For this reason incremental software purchases and pilot projects have become very popular in the BI space.

This was evident at IBIS as customers expressed a lot of interest in Xcelsius, XDM, Roambi, XWIS, GMaps, 360View, Version Manager and SAP BO EDGE solutions for very specific business issues and needs.

All in all, IBIS 2010 was a great BI gathering and information exchange and continues to grow in popularity. A couple of lucky attendees won iPads and a couple of not-so-lucky attendees dropped their phones in the ocean, but judging by the feedback everyone can’t wait to do it again.

Here are a few of the comments received back on IBIS 2010 :

“The IBIS conference was terrific this year.  I can’t wait to incorporate write-backs into our dashboards, and InfoBurst 2009 with dashboard bursting opens new doors for delivering customer information.  I also really enjoyed Aluchemie’s customer demo with all of their challenges they had to overcome!”

Kim Marshall, Waldinger Corporation

“I wanted to commend you and your team on the wonderful seminar.  My colleagues are very enthusiastic about their boot camp and the knowledgeable instructors they have met. You and your team have been wonderful throughout the past few days and everyone’s terrific attitudes have made the seminar a great success”

Melinda Dennis, Aluchemie

When asked, “What was the best part of the seminar for you?”, here are some of the responses :

“User Panel – excellent recognition of organizations with creative solutions”

“The class time. The first time I have ever been to a seminar where I was asked right from the beginning to reverse engineer an example”

“ The chance to talk and network with pros, find out what SAP doesn’t tell you about the product and get the best practices from people who have been in the trenches”

“…invaluable talking with other companies and knowledge sharing”

“… the workshops were excellent and very exercise intense so there was no boredom factor”

“Meeting with other users of the tools – It is a great way to get new ideas”

“The tips on real life best practices were extremely valuable – something that you cannot always get from other conferences”

“Size of the event led to good instruction and interaction”

“The training far surpasses any other training in the BI field. InfoSol has created a habitat for intensive training efforts at an economical price”

“The fact that I am learning things that are actually going to help me solve current problems – which also helps me sleep better at night”

IBIS 2010 Winners

SPX wins Most Valuable Dashboard

This year’s winner of the Most Valuable Dashboard was SPX Service Solutions who developed a series of complex dashboards to provide on-line interactive views of Global Strategic Customers and Line of Business P&L’s for company executives and financial managers. The data was retrieved from an SAP BW (Business Warehouse) and delivered comparisons and analysis never previously available.  The number of possible comparisons and drill-downs is huge and created some real challenges for the BI/BW team at SPX in terms of the amount of data to be retrieved. However, SPX overcame the data quantity and performance hurdles by using InfoBurst XDS with its Intelligent Caching.

The Most Innovative Dashboard Award is for the dashboard that is designed and developed in an innovative way or for an innovative solution.  United Educators, who provide insurance to educational institutions, needed a solution to enable their clients to Self-Serve and Leverage Policy Data to make informed decisions.  The United Educators dashboard application was certainly an innovative solution with its peer selection function that retained anonymity of the institutions being compared. Also, the design using selection /de-selection of multiple peer groups and write-back to prevent users “gaining” the system was unique and creative.

Best Business Dashboard won by Aluchemie

The Best Business Dashboard was awarded to Aluchemie, a manufacturer of anodes needed for the electrolysis process by which aluminum is extracted from ore, based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They were looking for a way to get Team Leaders, Production Managers and Executives excited about the roll out of their Manufacturing Execution System software, used to manage and monitor work-in-process on the factory floor. Xcelsius was the answer and they created a comprehensive set of options in a multi-tab dashboard with more than 120 different dynamic graphs showing trend analysis along with shift-by-shift and day-by-day comparisons of key production line metrics. The dashboard revolutionized their manufacturing reporting and brought to light critical production issues that could be seen clearly for the first time.  As one Team Leader put it, he felt like they were finally, “coming out of the Stone Age”.

ARI receives Most Xcellent Dashboard Award - IBIS 2010

Last but not least, the Most Xcellent Xcelsius Dashboard was won by ARI, an international fleet Vehicle Leasing and Management Company.   ARI already had the ability to compare and analyze key life cycle metrics of any vehicles through their existing customer portal but they wanted to make it more visually dynamic and add even more useful functionality. They used Xcelsius to create a visually intuitive interface with picture icons, dynamic sliders and a lot of pizzazz.

ARI’s Dashboard Prototype was shown at a key trade show and received rave reviews.

Representatives of the winning companies received their prestigious glass pyramid awards and also participated in a customer panel to explain how their dashboards were conceived and how their respective businesses are benefitting from them.  In addition, three of the winners also presented insightful case studies on their dashboards.

They had seen Xcelsius dashboards and were impressed by the dynamic visualization and felt this could make both an attractive and appealing way to present the information to their clients. However, they were faced with several challenges regarding automatically populating the dashboards initially and then automatically distributing them as standalone offline entities that could be used by both their Account Managers and clients without being connected back to the originating system.

They did not want to run separate jobs for each client to populate each dashboard. They wanted to run one job that would provide all the statistics for all customers and then split or burst that data by customer to feed each customer’s unique data into the same dashboard template. The amount of data that would be initially retrieved was large (many tens of thousands of rows) and even some of the individual customer dashboards had a fair amount of data (several thousand rows). Once the data had been burst for each customer it would need to be populated into the dashboard template, published as a shockwave file (SWF) and attached to an email that would need to be sent to the right group of people for each dashboard.

While this may seem like a tall order, the new InfoBurst 2009 solution was able to achieve all this relatively simply and quickly. InfoBurst 2009 is a scheduling, bursting and publishing solution for both Business Intelligence reports and dashboards . It has a built-in scheduler that can be either time or event based triggered. The event can be the result of a SQL statement which makes it very versatile for starting a job only when data has changed or other dependent events have occurred. InfoBurst can accept data from SQL, a Stored Procedure or a Business Intelligence query or report (Web Intelligence, Crystal, Desktop Intelligence, Microsoft Reporting Services etc.).

When handling Xcelsius dashboards, InfoBurst 2009 uses unique mechanisms for both ‘OFFLINE’ and ‘CONNECTED’ distribution requirements.

 For a ‘CONNECTED’ scenario, the Cache can be accessed from the Xcelsius dashboard in a variety of ways so that only the data required for a particular component of the dashboard is retrieved when required. We provide a number of components that we collectively call ‘INTELLIGENT CACHE’. The CACHE QUERY mechanism in InfoBurst 2009 allows you to use the full power and capability of SQL to selectively retrieve, aggregate and sort the data required for your Xcelsius dashboard from the Cache. The CROSSTAB mechanism allows you to generate crosstab tables in advance or on-demand. The FLIP mechanism allows you to PIVOT an existing Crosstab, switching the X and Y axis data. These features save an enormous amount of time and effort over other methods of pulling data into an Xcelsius dashboard and it’s fast! For ultimate flexibility, it is possible to have multiple caches and to populate a cache with data from multiple data sources.

 For an ‘OFFLINE’ scenario, InfoBurst 2009 is able to create and manage separate ranges within the Cache, and Burst these ranges to a common Dashboard, embedding the data inside of the SWF file and delivering the same Xcelsius dashboard with different data for each individual client.

InfoBurst 2009 also has intelligent distribution capabilities where it can read from an LDAP compliant address book, a database table or an Excel spreadsheet to select the relevant email addresses or target destinations for the dashboard or report. Since this customer required the offline dashboards to be sent via email , the information was read from a database table containing all the individual’s information and is able to determine the customer name and criteria and select just the email address for the relevant recipients.

This company is now using InfoBurst 2009 to distribute offline Xcelsius dashboards automatically , intelligently and swiftly to its customers and is saving a lot of time and money in the process.

For more information or a free demonstration and trial on InfoBurst 2009, go to www.InfoBurst2009.com

Answer: There are a few application variables that BusinessObjects provides for use when a user logs into InfoView, one of which is BOUSER.  BOUser is the variable for the userId that is logged in and can be used when Xcelsius is aware of the user session.  The user session is passed to Xcelsius via a flash variable that has been made available in XI for this purpose.  It is called, CELogonToken.

BOUSER contains the value of the userId of the user logged in.  It can be used to provide user-specific row-level security through the universe design by adding a self join to a field containing the userIds in your data.  With XI3.1 Designer, this can be applied at the class level (across all objects in a class), or through the traditional method of being applied just when objects from that specific table are used in the query.

Here is an example of how this variable is applied:
Note that the self join is applied against the Manager field.

The Manager field for eFashion contains usernames like “Queen” and “Tuttle”.  For this example, we have added these as users into our CMC.

In QAAWS, I have created a web service to return Manager and their corresponding Store.  This query automatically prompts for the BOUSER since the SQL contains the @Variable(‘BOUSER’) restriction.

In Xcelsius, I have referenced this QAAWS with the appropriate connection defined and entering Name of Manager and Store name results into cells that are viewable through a spreadsheet component.

IMPORTANT: QAAWS will return a promptValue invalid error message if a valid value is not declared as a default for bouser.  Make sure you point bouser to a cell in the Excel spreadsheet of your Xcelsius design and input a valid userId as a default.

In order for Xcelsius to know the BOUSER userId of the user logged into BO, Xcelsius needs to be aware of the session.  If you enter a login and password to the QAAWS connection, that username will be used all the time.  Instead, these entries should be left blank.

If they are left blank, then the users will be prompted to log into QAAWS when they attempt to refresh the QAAWS query from the dashboard. 

For both performance and ease of use, it is usually desired that the users continue using their existing session for a single-sign on method.  To do this, a flash variable connection should be added which includes the range name CELogonToken.  This hands the existing session token over to Xcelsius seamlessly.

The BOUSER or userId is not viewable in the token value as displayed.  The token, however, makes this application variable available for use as the Login value passed to the QAAWS connector upon refresh.

In the end, my excel spreadsheet design looks like this:

I export the Xcelsius dashboard to the SAP BusinessObjects Platform (note that an Enterprise license is required for this functionality).

Then, I log into InfoView as Tuttle and view the dashboard. When I click the refresh button, the Manager Tuttle and his/her store gets returned.

Incidentally, the default value of Queen is never used.  The default is only to allow the bouser variable to load with the QAAWS definition, but only the actual user logged in ever gets passed to the query.

In this blog I will discuss 2 methods, both of which are valid and are useful ways to organize dashboard data.  Deciding as an organization which approach you adopt can help with the process of taking up someone else’s project. 

 Some Xcelsius developers like to use a method of having all the data that is being used in the dashboard on one (or more) tab/s of the Excel spreadsheet, and then as you need to use data for display, using a series of vlookups or match & index functions for displaying data on charts, which they layout on other tabs of the spreadsheet.

My preferred method is to spread the layout in such a way that the names of the Excel tabs generally correspond to the functional area on the Xcelsius dashboard, perhaps even the same name of the Xcelsius  tab (Either the Tab Set Container or the Label based menu, is what I’m thinking of), so that all the data being expressed on that “page” of the dashboard is on one tab in the Excel spreadsheet behind the scenes. 

I like to have the data insert & any manipulations I have to do for expressing that data nearby the loaded data, so that it is all in one place & I can find it easily.  The only difficulty with this is when you have many components on one “page” or you have to create several aggregate levels to display.  Spreading it out & spacing it can become an issue, and this is where again, labeling the spreadsheet is so important.  (But aren’t we glad that if we move data around on the spreadsheet that the links follow, for those of you who have been using Xcelsius since the 4.5 days!). 

This approach, of course, assumes you have the aggregated data to work with!  Which leads back to my previous blog regarding data connectivity options.   If I have to use QaaWS, I end up having to do a lot of manipulation in the universe to get the data to look or be ordered the way I want to use it in Xcelsius.  I usually have to end up making many of what I call, “dimensionalized measures” when I want to end up with a crosstab result.  So I have a measure for Jan Sales, Feb Sales, etc.  Very tedious.  Sorting is another  issue that is often easier addressed in the universe, but also can be labor intensive.  

Live Office gives me the option to create crosstabs and sort the data in any way I wish and I can also have multiple tabs to aggregate the data at different levels (YTD, MTD,  past 30 days, etc).  The problem that I so often bump into with this approach is the amount of data when we get down to the detail level.  We have all experienced poor performance any time we go over the 512 row default and horrible performance when we approach 1000 rows. 

All of these are reasons why I enjoy using the InfoBurst XDS or XDM option, as it addresses all these issues, plus gives me many more options.  The Intelligent Cache syntax of this tool is by far the most exciting feature, in my opinion.  Using their syntax, I can pass parameters to the XML url call and only return the rows of data I wish to display.  For example, within my xml url call, I can add syntax that returns …. YEAR=2009;DIVISION=HPD;DEPT=23.  This ability to extract just the rows of data I want to display helps keep my dashboards very responsive, since I am not loading it down with too much data.  It also gives me the ability to go to a much more detailed level than I would have been able to with QaaWS or LiveOffice.

XDS or XDM also has syntax to return unique values of a particular column from an xml data set which I can use for  my selector.  My selector will always have accurate values, as it is loaded from the current xml cache, rather than from a hard-coded list in my Excel spreadsheet which may not be up-to-date.

And, I have the flexibility to create these large XML data sets from a Web Intelligence document or by writing a query, directly to the database, or even from an Excel spreadsheet, and any combination of all three!

The one technology in recent years that has managed to captivate the business users in organizations across the globe is undoubtedly – Dashboards.  Dashboards speak to them in a language which they are familiar with, the language of graphs, charts and metrics.  The BI Dashboard serves as an abstraction layer that shields the business users from the intricate and unwelcoming world of the ‘Data Churners’.  It is this instrument therefore, that should be leveraged to enlighten the management of financial losses that are incurred due to a seemingly trivial typo error or a misplaced digit in the sales figures.  Although this may not be the panacea one is looking for, creating a real-time dashboard which attaches a price tag to every data quality issue and extrapolates the figures to demonstrate their long term impact, may just act like a sip of coffee that will stimulate their business senses.

 Here’s an example of a Data Quality Dashboard

 This dashboard was the outcome of the convergence of three technologies: BO Data Quality,  InfoBurst 2009,  and Xcelsius.  Bundling a DQ dashboard with DQ Services benefits in the following ways: 

• Getting the initial buy in from the senior management
• Understanding the DQ issues that are creating havoc
• Tracking the performance of the DQ initiative itself
• Displaying the relevant financial metrics to answer the ROI question

.

Photo Credit: Sieve photo in this post from Wikimedia

 Whether you find yourself having to update one of your own dashboards after a period of time of not working on it, or having to hand off the maintenance of the dashboard to a colleague, the initial effort of good documentation will save valuable hours and ensure continuity and success.  In this post some of the graphics will speak for themselves – you know the cliche of ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. 

The graphics show examples of: 

• good labeling,
• use of color to enhance visual cues
• and the use of comments within Excel. 

Use of Color and Labeling

Below are samples of Excel spreadsheets that incorporates the use of visual cues like color coding with simple, clear and easy to follow labels showing where components derive their inputs.

Using Excel Comments

Another helpful option is to use the built in Excel feature of Inserting a Comment.  This leaves a small red triangle in the top right corner of a cell to indicate that a comment has been added to that cell. When the mouse hovers over the cell, the comment pops up. 

Helpful tips can be included within the comment.

Comments can be added to any cell by right-clicking on a cell and selecting “Insert Comment”.  Once a comment has been added to a cell, the small red triangle will appear.  A comment can be edited or deleted by right-clicking on the cell.

Using a Legend

There are many ways to document your Xcelsius Dashboard Excel Spreadsheet. 

I would love to hear about your “Best Practices”.

There is an Xcelsius Bootcamp being offered in Track 4 of this year’s IBIS 2010 event June 6-9 - Seeing Beyond Business Intelligence. 

This is a brief summary of the differences between these 3 options which may be helpful.

QaaWS is a BusinessObjects web service that access BusinessObjects universes (and only universes) to pull back data.  Each time a dashboard is opened and selections are made, a real-time query is launched against production data, which, depending on the amount of data requested, can take many long seconds or minutes.  I have not found it to be very effective, and the few companies that do use it, have highly summarized tables in their data warehouse to use for this purpose (i.e. lots of preparation work).  The only upside I see to this method is that security is already in place based on BO user ids, and, real-time data retrieval (if that is the requirement). Large amounts of data (i.e., more than 500 rows of data) returned by the web service will significantly slow down the performance of the dashboard.  

With Live Office you can access Web Intelligence or Crystal reports as your data source and use the functionality of these reporting tools to summarize, crosstab and format your data.  The advantage is that you can schedule these reports to refresh in BO (InfoView) and then use the latest instance of that report for your Xcelsius data source, without waiting for it to refresh.  The disadvantage is that it requires users to log into BusinessObjects every time they access the dashboard.  (Supposedly you can use single-sign-on with this, but I have not seen it working anywhere).  Obviously, if you want to deploy this solution outside of BusinessObjects, like hosting the SWF file on SharePoint or an Intranet, most companies do not like having to sign on again.  Also, it would not work if you want to deploy outside the network (outside a firewall).  There have been many posts on the forums about the “flakiness” of LiveOffice, often losing connections and unable to refresh reports.  Since Live Office has to hold the data in the Xcelsius spreadsheet, the amount of data returned will have a negative impact on dashboard performance.  This last item has been the biggest barrier to our customers, who often wish to show granular data in their dashboards, or a significant amount of historical data.

InfoBurst XDS and XDM were designed to overcome these obstacles.  XDS can use Web Intelligence or Desktop Intelligence reports as data sources for pulling data, which it can refresh overnight (based on a schedule) and convert this data to xml.  XML is the fastest way to load data into Xcelsius.  XDS does not require a BusinessObjects login.  XDS also has the option of accessing a database directly (any database that can be accessed via an ODBC connection) through SQL queries, which can also be scheduled and converted to XML.  XDS also provides options for distributing the dashboard (putting on a network share, an intranet site, or as an email attachment or embedded in an in-line html email).  The biggest advantage, though, is the Intelligent Cache feature which allows dashboard developers to “cache” a very large set of data (I am currently working on a data set of over 18,000 rows of data), and then pass parameters through the xml code, based on selections the user makes on the dashboard, which then returns the small data set needed for that particular chart.  (On the above example I am passing parameters, based on drop-down menus, for Division, Plant, Department, Day and Shift, which returns the 6 rows of data I need to display – shift hours per day per Department.)  Since the dashboard is only loading these 6 rows of data, obviously the performance is very fast.    We recently converted a QaaWS dashboard where the data loading time when changing customers went from 2 minutes or so to less than 10 seconds, using Intelligent Cache filtering.