InetSoft Product How-To: Creating Report Scorecards

InetSoft's reporting software allows users to create report scorecards with the purpose of key metric monitoring in real-time. View the information below to learn more about the Style Intelligence solution.

A scorecard is used to keep track of certain parameters (e.g., Sales Revenue). Multiple users can monitor these parameters from the Report Portal. These parameters (metrics) can also be measured at regular intervals (triggers).

They can be checked against certain conditions (thresholds, time comparisons, custom business logic etc.) to which they must comply. If they don't, specified actions can be automatically taken (email notifications, etc.). The metric, trigger, conditions and other settings are collectively handled as a target. A scorecard is thus a collection of one or more targets.

The following are the basic steps involved in setting up a scorecard. (Each step is explained in detail in the following sections).

Note: The Scheduler must be running in order to use score­cards.

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1. Create a data asset in the data worksheet, which retrieves the data to be monitored.

2. Create a metric: Specify one of the numeric fields in the asset as the metric.

3. Assign a detail report for the metric.

4. Create a target based on this metric.

5. Specify a trigger for the target. A trigger specifies when the metric is evaluated. A custom trigger can be also added to the system.

6. Specify a condition, which can be a threshold, time based compari­son, or custom script function.

7. Specify an action, such as notification email, print, save to disk, etc.

8. Specify permissions to this target and publish the target to different users.

9. Add more metrics and targets to your scorecard as desired.

Note: Targets can be created by the end user as well as by an administrator. Metrics can only be created by an administrator.

InetSoft Viewpoint

"The open standards aspect is very important to us since it allows our customers to integrate our technology more easily and leverage assets they already have, in terms of hardware and software and IT skills. So based on this BI platform, our software delivers a host of front-end BI tools including visualization tools, enterprise reporting, monitoring dashboards, and analysis. Those functions were based on a very powerful patent-pending technology we call Data Block.

This Data Block technology is really made up of a back-end data mashup engine and a caching middle layer. There is a front-end we call the worksheet, which is a Web-based, spreadsheet-like user interface that a power user can easily use to combine and transform data blocks. The data blocks are typically started at the atomic data block level. That is typically created by an IT or a BI specialist. They choose these data blocks and performance tune those data blocks.

Then the power users can use those building blocks to build more complex, but more useful structures for answering the questions they have on hand. And all the data blocks you build, in turn become building blocks themselves. You can build on this architecture, building very sophisticated structures which you can use to answer a wide range of unanticipatible questions. " - Luke Liang, CEO, InetSoft

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