Create dashboards for real-time business analysis
SEQUEL executive dashboards summarize and present important business measurements in a graphical window on your PC. Dashboards can include any combination of SEQUEL views or graphs, Web pages, images, or Windows applications—whatever you need to monitor key business activities. Managers and other analysts can use the information displayed in a dashboard to help your organization run more effectively and efficiently.
Analyze complex business information
An executive dashboard is an ideal way to display and analyze your key business data from any System i application—manufacturing, distribution, inventory, and financials. With financials for example, you can create one or more SEQUEL financial views and display their results in the dashboard. You can even combine consolidated income statements, balance sheets, graphs, and reports to create a single, easy-to-use display. Plus, with SEQUEL you can customize the dashboard even more by adding your company logo, descriptive text, and links to supporting data!
A SEQUEL dashboard is more than just a data display. You can use SEQUEL’s drill-down capabilities to analyze the financial information displayed in the dashboard. For example, you can drill down to see account detail, sales by company, or sales by profit center. With a SEQUEL executive dashboard, you can create a complete picture of your financial status.
As simple as 1, 2, 3!
Setting up a new SEQUEL dashboard is very easy. These are the three basic steps:
- From ViewPoint, select File > New > SEQUEL Dashboard on the Explorer menu, or click the SEQUEL Dashboard icon in the New tab (shown below). A new dashboard window displays—a blank canvas for your creativity and requirements. You can resize the dashboard window any time during the design process.
- In the Dashboard window, select File > Properties to display the Dashboard Properties window. Use this display to enter a title for your new dashboard and select a background color. A color palette appears to make specifying colors easy.
- Click Insert in the menu bar to select objects for your dashboard. When you select an object type, a “browse” window displays so you can easily find the file, object, or application.
When you insert an object into the dashboard, you can resize the object window and move it to any position in the dashboard.
Repeat step 3 to continue adding objects to your dashboard display. You can add any of the following:
- SEQUEL objects (views, tables, reports, and applications)
- Excel spreadsheets
- Graphic files (company logo or other images)
- Text (customizable fonts, colors, sizes, and styles)
- Web pages or browser windows
- Other Windows applications
- Action buttons (to launch scripts or drill-down applications)
- Gauges
When you’ve got your dashboard the way you want it, save it so you can run it anytime. If this a personal dashboard, you can save it as a ViewPoint shortcut file (*.vpt) that you can launch from your desktop. If this is a dashboard you want to share with others, save it on the System i like other shared ViewPoint objects.
Even after you save your dashboard, you can easily modify it. Simply right-click the dashboard object in the ViewPoint Explorer and select “Open” from the pop-up menu.
Display data from multiple databases
With SEQUEL dashboards, you can combine System i, UNIX, and Windows data on a single executive dashboard panel and consolidate data from multiple databases in your network. You no longer have to transfer System i data from your DB2/400 database to a data warehouse to query it. SEQUEL is the perfect System i-centered solution.
SEQUEL lets you access DB2/400 databases, Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and other JDBC type-4 databases. SEQUEL makes it easy to create connections to these databases. Best of all, end users never have to know that they are viewing data from another system, or building a dashboard that presents data from multiple sources. You can combine data from Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 to create a single-point-of-access to your entire organization’s data.
SEQUEL executive dashboards provide organizational data on-demand, no matter what information you need, or where it’s stored.
Contributed by Steven Smith, Technical Consultant
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