In that post, I will show you how easy is to connect your BW query to Expertise Dashboard Designer and build in 10 minutes an exciting presentation of your data. As a result of this guide, I will have a portable Windows based dashboard that I can use during my management meetings in the future just refreshing the data behind the scenes with a single click.
Business scenario:
You have to prepare a presentation in your organisation for the monthly management meeting. The meeting is about discussing the company's success by comparing the actual sales with the target. All of your important data for analytics and planning is stored in SAP BW datawarehouse and you usually analyse it with different queries. However, being an important person in your company, your time schedule is very tight, so you don't always have time for doing extensive analytics and preparing presentations. You know that discussion based on facts with the help of high quality charts is the key factor of your success but you want to save your time in the preparation process. You want to focus on the business content and on the interpretation of your data and not on the deep-dive in the technical details.
Let's see how you can solve this problem with the following walkthrough.
Steps:
1. Enable your query for external access:
Open your query in the query designer and select the Query Properties from the toolbar.
Then go to the Extended tab and Allow External Access to this Query by switching on the checkbox By OLE DB for OLAP.
As a result of this step your query will be accessible for external BI applications supporting XMLA interface like the ExpertISe Dashboard Designer.
2. Launch the BW datasource wizard:
Launch the ExpertISe Dashboard Designer and from the Data Source toolbar open the BW datasource wizard.
In the wizard steps select your query and the infoobjects you want to use in your dashboard.
As a result of this step you will have a connection established to your query and you are ready for your dashboard layout design.
3. Insert a chart, a gauge and card
Now you will define the layout of your dashboard by inserting dashboard elements like chart, gauges, cardviews, tables and so on from the Insert toolbar.
I have inserted a gauge, a card and a chart and I have adjusted the empty layout below with drag and drop.
4. Populate your data to the charts
Click each chart and from drag and drop your fields from the left side to the data items of the chart. The chart will immediately show the populated data.
5. Save and view your dashboard
Save your work for later use by clicking on the Save button on the File toolbar.
Enjoy the result! Next time you will just need to push the Refresh button to see fresh data!
Summary:
In that walkthrough, I showed you some easy to follow steps for connecting your BW data to the Expertise Dashboard Designer. As a result you and your colleagues can enjoy the quality of your presentation, creating such a data representation will be a fun and you can save tremendous time just refreshing the data behind your dashboard.
The Expertise Dashboard Designer has more interesting features what I didn't show you now, you can read more details on the Expertise Dashboard Designer Product page or stay tuned and visit us later on our Blog page's Dashboarding section. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us at sales@expertise-team.com