LS Retail BI

Information/requirements/deployment steps

Why LS Retail BI?

• Customers require more analysis and reporting than NAV traditionally delivers

• Maximize the value of the customer‘s existing investment

• Utilize LS Retail‘s superior retail and NAV expertise

LS Retail BI - Your benefit

• Since LS Retail BI is specifically designed to work on top of LS Retail NAV, implementation time can be as short as a single day, hence drastically reducing the cost and implementation time associated with your BI implementation.

• Very quickly and inexpensively meets 80 - 90% of your reporting requirements

• LS Retail NAV + LS Retail BI = End-to-end solution• Starts out as „BI out of the box“ – future

enhancements can be easily deployed, actually welcomed

How it works

Data warehouseNAV

OLAP Cubes Reports, Dashboards,

KPI‘s

Predefined TimeXTender template copies data from your LS Retail NAV system to a data warehouse and creates the OLAP cubes. A process that doesn‘t take more than a day or two to complete!

TimeXTender (data warehouse made easy)

1. Connect to NAV with a specially developed adapder

2. All relevant tables and fields extracted from LS Retail NAV and pulled into the staging area of the data warehouse. Cleansing and transformation performed here.

3. Clean and „reporting ready“ data placed in the data warehouse

4. OLAP cubes that offer an unparalleled opportunity for analyzing and reporting on NAV data

LS Retail BI - Easy deployment

• TimeXTender is installed on the SQL server• LS Retail BI script downloaded, installed and run on the

customer server– Data extracted from NAV– Data loaded into staging area of the Data Warehouse– Data cleansed and placed in the production area of the Data Warehouse– OLAP cubes created

• LS Retail BI ready for use!– Depending on data quantity, connectivity and server performance, the process can be

completed in as quickly as in a single day

Solution components

• SQL server 2005 or later – pure SSAS• TimeXTender

– TimeXtender is aleading agile ETL tool used to build the Data Warehouse (purely metadata driven – no coding)

• Excel 2010– Prebuilt reports in Excel (Finance, Sales, AccRec/AccPay, Inventory, Purchasing, new

functionality)

• Sharepoint 2010 (Optional)– Report publishing via Sharepoint 2010 Excel Web Services

possible• Reporting Services reports can be utilized extensively

Technical requirements• Windows 2008 server running SQL server standard or

enterprise• Preferably 64 bit OS• Min 8 GB RAM*• High performance disks (SCSI or Solid State)• Disk size depends on size of data to import• Seperate disks for data and logs

• Remote desktop access on the server must be available• Server must have internet access• User must be local admin on server as admin on SQL

server

* Assuming retrieving data from a single instance of NAV. If there are more than one, more RAM is recommended.

Training (TimeXTender)

• 2 day technical training on the TimeXTender ETL tool• Demo system provided• PDF document with Specific exercises on ETL and

OLAP (aligned with the demo system)• For partners and customer technical people

• Excel Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts• Local Excel courses recommended• No additional knowledge required

Training (TimeXTender)

Training (TimeXTender)

Deployment steps – Single instance NAV

No Task Descriptions Estimated hours

1. Installation Install TimeXTender and the LS Retail BI template

2

2. Inital dataload* Connect to LS Retail NAV backend system and retrieve data based on the LS Retail BI template

10

3. Reconciliation** Verify that results in the data warehouse match with the underlying NAV system.

2

4. Scheduling Set up scheduling for incremental load of data from NAV to DW

1

5. Reports*** Create custom reports based on customer preferences – if required.

Total hours: 15

* Dependant of the size of the NAV database. Inital dataload is always the most time consuming one. Data must be loaded into the staging and production tables of the data warehouse. Afterwards, data is incrementally loaded into the data warehouse. As an example, it takes about 2.5 hours to do the inital load data from a 150 GB NAV database into the staging tables of a data warehouse server with a single disk, 64 bit OS and 6GB of RAM.** It is always recommended to validate the data once they have been copied to the data warehouse. User confidence in the data accuracy is key.*** Optional. Number of standard reports are delivered with the system. Here we refer to optional reports that the customer might want to have created.

Reporting – vast possibilities

• Pivot tables and charts provide high quality reporting and analysis

• Slicers provide the possibility of doing filtering „on the run“

• Standard reports as a starting point. Users enhance them and develop their own.

• Pure Excel – no addins and huge knowledge residing with users