Zap Business Intelligence’s provides advanced BI capabilities including:
- “Cross border” BI. Typically, any work done for one customer in a BI system cannot be easily transported to another. Zap’s unique architecture means that BI is re-usable, transportable and sharable – across customers, applications or geographical reach. Read more.
- Advanced drill-through. Zap provides enhanced drill-through capabilities, which provide you with more options in exploring your data. For example, on Zap’s drill-through reports, users can order their columns, add calculated columns, apply formatting including conditional formatting, and add charts. Drill through is available even on calculated members, such as a calculation that adds the revenue from two different business units.
- Flexible relative time calculations. Normally, relative time calculations are built into the cube or other multidimensional databases and then tend to be static. This means all possible requirements must be pre-configured and inevitably, users want extra requirements that can’t be met without changes to the cube or other multidimensional databases. Zap takes a different approach. Relative time is handled via functions in the BI web layer. The system comes packaged with common time functions; but users can easily create their own – with zero programming required. So if a user has an unusual requirement like comparing this month with the same month last year and the same month the year before that, a calculation can literally be created in seconds – without needing technical expertise.
- Internationalized content. Complementing the translations in Analysis Services 2008, Zap Business Intelligence supports multi-lingual content. For instance, a report is produced in English, and headings can be translated into French and German and exposed to local language users. This doesn’t affect the report structure, and any future changes made the report are reflected in all different language versions. Note that this capability refers to data translations, not the translation of the portal interface. For the portal interface, currently numerous languages are supported – please ask for the latest list if you are interested.
- Powerful conditional formatting. Zap makes full use of the power of conditional formatting in the cube, while hiding the complexity of Multidimensional Expressions (MDX). Business users, without needing technical assistance, can create logic such as: highlight all salespeople who met their benchmark; or highlight all revenue from customer X.
- Advanced bursting. Zap takes bursting capabilities to a new level making them easy to use and change. Users can burst emails based on a KPI trigger and send sliced reports to each recipient – with each recipient impersonated to ensure the attached report is customized to their individual security access.
