Analysis with Dodeca

Financial analysis is the continuous process of investigating a business’ profitability based on past performance. The insight gained gives decision makers the power to proactively optimize future results.

Dodeca helps business users complete in-depth analyses in less time and with less effort. Using Dodeca’s powerful speed-of-thought analytical capabilities, users seamlessly navigate their way through data within and across Essbase and relational systems. Several key features that make Dodeca an outstanding analytical tool include:

Essbase analytics.Dodeca provides the same extensive Essbase functionality available with the Essbase Excel add-in, including all the slice-and-dice operations, such as retrieve, zoom in/out, pivot, as well as the user-specified customization options, including drill level, suppress missing, and formula retention, etc.

Customizable ad hoc query behavior.Dodeca allows an administrator to tailor an ad hoc query capability to provide the optimal experience based on the users’ needs and skill levels.  The interface can easily be configured as an unrestricted freeform ad hoc that allows pivoting and drilling for all dimensions, or as a much more structured and guided experience where the operations available to the user are controlled on a dimension-by-dimension basis.

Point of view selection.Users are able to quickly view data for a specific combination of Essbase members or relational criteria by interactively selecting the point of view of interest.  The point of view selectors are highly configurable; the user interface, content, and behavior of each selector can easily be customized and optimized for an individual report or set of reports.

Context-sensitive data exploration. Dodeca’s Intelligent Navigation capability enables users to move seamlessly between related systems while retaining the specific context of interest.

Intelligent Navigation at Work

During analysis, a user typically starts by reviewing summary level information to look for unexpected variations between actual and expected results.  When a variation is found, the analyst investigates by drilling into progressively lower level details, which may continue to the transaction level, and even to the source document. At every step, Dodeca's Intelligent Navigation feature enables the user to quickly navigate to the relevant details with a single click of the mouse.

In this customer example, the analyst is able to drill through from a summary level report to the Line Detail Report to see more details for a specific number, which in this case is the June 2008 actual results for a Direct Non-Interest Expense. The summary data and detail data can be located in different Essbase databases.  With the Intelligent Navigation feature, the context of the selected cell is passed from the summary report to the detail report, so the latter contains the relevant data for the selected number.

Next, the analyst finds a number that warrants further investigation.  The next level of information available is the general ledger. The paradigm remains the same; the analyst drills through to the general ledger data with a single mouse click. The general ledger report contains all the relevant entries for the selected detail number.

For this company, the system contains millions of records, which are filtered by the report to extract only the general ledger entries and accounts payable sub-ledger postings that are related to the specific detail number of interest. When transactional details are this readily available, an analyst is much more likely to look at the details, and gets a much more complete understanding of the data.

In some cases, the ledger detail does not contain enough information to fully understand the transaction. An analyst must look at the source documents, such as invoice copies, to learn the full story. Again, with Intelligent Navigation, source documents are a single mouse click away.

With Dodeca, the analysis process is uninterrupted, continuous, and fast; the user experience across the different views of data is consistent, cohesive, and seamless; and the result is the ability to make timely decisions based on all the right information.

We invite you to contact us to schedule a live demo of Dodeca.