Spotfire: Bringing Business on the right Spot
October 03, 2013
Spotfire: Bringing Business on the right Spot
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
5.0.1
Overall Satisfaction
- Reports that take hours to refresh data can be scheduled, making them available to users on a click.
- Users can change filters on the fly, and get their answers in no time.
- One visualization can cater to different types of user roles. A Store Manager would be interested to see store level details; an area manager would want to see all stores under his area, and likewise for Region/Zone managers. We can create one visualization that shows summary based on what level users choose from drop down - store or area or region or zone.
- One can compare trending for sales of a product across all states, for example, by breaking down a visualization by state using the Trellis feature of Spotfire.
- Defining hierarchy levels in Spotfire is very easy. One doesn't need to do any dimensional modelling, or build cubes for this.
- Checkbox Filters: Filters just trigger report refresh the moment there is a change is list of values. This sometimes become painful in case of Checkbox filters. Suppose there are 10 values in a checkbox filter, and one wants to view data for only 3 out of 10 values. The moment one unchecks a value, spotfire starts loading the data. There is no way to control the loading/refresh of data only after all 7 values have been unchecked.
- Managers are able to plan ahead for any staffing needs at a store.
- Target v/s Actual reports gives them great data about how the business is doing.
Product Usage
100 - FP&A, Area Managers, CIO
3 - We have one dedicated administrator for different the Spotfire tools that we use - Spotfire, BE , BW etc We have one Spotfire developer, I am taking care of both development and administration.
- Some reports are built to show trending of different financial parameters, e.g. targets vs actual.
- One report shows data about #transactions that take place at a store, how many employees are there in that store, and how many hours do they work. So, this report shows all this information to help businesses decide the Staffing requirements at each store, and see how busy a store is on each day of a week, or during Christmas holidays, for example.
- Ranking reports to show Top N opportunities by Customers/Regions etc
Evaluation and Selection
Reports were either based on complex cubes, or Excel reports.
Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Training
- Self-taught
Yes, the product is easy to learn, and some reporting/BI background is good to have. There are some jump start videos on the Tibco Spotfire website that are very helpful for beginners.
Configuration
Customizations were done for enabling features such as impersonation, schedule updates and Logging/Monitoring etc.
Support
No - Spotfire environment is quite stable, and the catastrophic situations can be handled through admin's expertise and customer service support that comes free with product purchase.
Usability
Reliability
Integration
- Not in the current project. In a previous project, Spotfire reports were available from another application