I just got back from an awesome NRF conference in NY. Along with me, at the Microsoft booth was a Norwegian company called Profitbase. I worked with Proftbase and the PerformancePoint team for the last few weeks to build out a dashboard to showcase the KPIs exposed by the Profitbase Solution.
The solution was built using the ProfitBase 2007 configurable data warehousing and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Cubes software and the Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 technology stack. The ProfitBase 2007 software, which takes advantage of the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, is used to develop and deploy the ready-to-use point-of-sales data source connector and OLAP Cubes templates enabling fast and easy deployments for retailers. Microsoft PerformancePoint was used to display KPIs and metrics in dashboards, scorecards and reports, and to perform advanced ad-hoc analysis and planning. Information is easily visualized and distributed throughout the organization with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, which provides retailers with increased control and insight into day-to-day performance.
Thanks to Rohit Rahi from the PerformancePoint team for his work on the dashboards and excellent collaboration from Borre Tharaldsen, Rune Vatnamot, Edvard Gundersen from Profitbase in getting the cubes and sample data together to make this happen. It was great to finally meet with the Norwegian team in NY. By working with the ARTS Data Model, defining standard retail KPIs and easily linking operational data sources to a data warehouse, ProfitBase and Microsoft bring a cost effective, functionally rich BI solution to the retail marketplace:I look forward to the ARTS schema being implemented in many of the Retail Organizations that I work with.