Today, businesses have to manage multiple types of data from multiple sources, all while managing a myriad of business processes. To meet these challenges, businesses rely on software to support their accounting and process requirements. In this article we will discuss the differences between software choices; specifically, Accounting software and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, as well as how this relates to the difference between “reporting” and “analytics”. Accounting software simply provides core financial information; basically, a snapshot of “what happened”. This software is tailored specifically for accounting, to be used by the Accounting and Finance departments. Enterprise Resource Planning … Read More
Healthcare Research Firm Uses Enhanced Reporting to Improve Service Delivery
A healthcare research organization needed to better track invoices from project awardees, along with research metrics from multiple groups. Their manual data collection and analysis were disjointed, prevented the timely allocation of resources, and cost too much time. Out-of-the-box Salesforce reports and tracking were not meeting their needs. Our team built a custom application within Salesforce to track invoices and pull together other key data from across the organization. With their data now being logged within Salesforce, reporting became supercharged. The process that previously required multiple email approvals and attachments, now is automated, making critical financial and research reports readily … Read More
Enabling University Students to Share Experiences From Outside the Classroom
Universities strive to build strong connections with every student and deliver an unparalleled education that combines classroom learning with real-world experiences and self-discovery. Our client, a top 50 liberal arts university, embarked on a project to meet this need with a new hybrid program. Their plan was to use Salesforce to track the many interactions that students had with mentors and faculty, as well as to provide a platform for reflecting on experiences and opportunities that happened outside the classroom. Efforts prior to our involvement resulted in fundamental challenges, including difficult navigation, limited reporting capabilities, and a lack of alignment … Read More
Dimension Filters in Tableau
Being able to toggle between dimensions or measures in Tableau is a nice feature to have when building a story for users or just on the dashboard. Being able to give the user the ability to do this is easy and can be done in a couple of steps. The first step to creating a toggle is to “Create Parameter…” in Tableau by right clicking on the left side of the program: To create the parameter here you have to change the data type to String and allowable values to list. Once you’re done with that you can type in … Read More
Hosting a Shiny App in Tableau
Graphics in both Tableau and Shiny have their pluses and minuses. Tableau is good for drag and drop graphics that is easy to change the types of graphs given the situation with little to no coding. R/Shiny graphics are completely customizable from 3D graphics to violin plots, which is a boxplot that incorporates a probability density function. Also, with Shiny you can get summaries of the data and perform many other advanced statistical methods; beware of running analyses in Shiny without checking the proper diagnostic tests related to the data at hand (this is my statistics background speaking). Where Tableau … Read More
Tips on Developing Shiny Apps in RStudio Server
Development from the RStudio Server is seamless to its desktop counterpart with the only difference being that you access it through your web browser. In fact, RStudio Server has some advantages because all you need is a computer that can connect to the internet and you’re using all of the server’s resources for computations rather than your local machine. This means that you can develop R code using a chromebook or tablet, in fact, I connected to my RStudio server on my iPhone and could code if I wanted but quickly found that it would be more of a hassle than it’s … Read More
A Commentary of Dual Axis Graphics
My philosophy of visualizing data is keep it simple, you want the audience to look at a graph and know within a few moments what it is showing. The key is for accuracy in interpreting the graph and speed; we need to be careful of potentially distorting the data because we don’t want the audience to misinterpret the graph too quickly. An easy way of distorting the data is changing the range of the axis which can cause the audience to believe there are more extreme changes in the data when there actually isn’t and the data is overall stable. … Read More
An Alternative to Using an Oracle BI Publisher Data Table for a One Line Table
When creating a one line table in Oracle BI Publisher using a Data Table, it will give you redundant filtering options on the titles of the table and an unnecessary subtotal at the end of the table if there is a fact in the table. Instead, we would like to have a similar table but without the filters and the subtotal. To do this we will add a Layout Grid to the dimensions that we have predefined. This will give the overall BI Publisher report a much cleaner look by removing two of the features of the data table. … Read More