This market leading reporting tool has the has capability to deliver great reports and has been used by many Orchard Housing customers due to its excellent and powerful features.

Business Objects uses ‘universes’ to shield users from the complexity of underlying data and provide a translation between the database terminology and understandable business terms - the so-called ‘semantic layer’. This is one of its great advantages, but also a constraint, as any data not included in the universe is not available to report on. Also, many universes are overly complex, meaning data cannot be accessed as expected, and/or incorrect results are obtained. It is pitched as an easy to use, end user, tool but experience shows this is often not the case.

Our experience of Business Objects, particularly in the Orchard Housing environment, means that we can almost always find a solution to any reporting requirement, sometimes through multiple merged queries, possibly using a modified universe or custom SQL.

Power BI is Microsoft’s latest reporting tool and is a powerful interactive dashboard data visualisation product. It has been compared to more established products such as QlikView and Tableau, but is much less expensive.

Microsoft say: “Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights. Monitor your business and get answers quickly with rich dashboards available on every device.”

Take a look at these examples:

• Interactive drillable map
• Arrears dashboard

Power BI includes as standard visuals such as:

• Tables and matrixes
• Bar, line, area, scatter and combined charts
• Slicers
• Gauges
• Single and multi line forms
• Maps, filled and point based

A report page can include several of the above visuals showing different aspects of a data set, and by default, all the visuals are interactive. So for example, clicking on a bar in a bar chart showing costs by area would adjust any other visuals on the page to show data just for that selected area.

Drillable hierarchies can be built into any visual enabling rapid navigation from summary to detail data. At the lowest levels there are options to view the underlying data or records.

Maps have built in functionality to automatically recognise geographic data including postcodes, towns, countries etc.

There is also Orchard Reporting Server (ORS) and DataPA OpenAnalytics, which is a cost-effective alternative, which when combined provides a reporting solution providing web based dashboards