STATISTICA Enterprise Report Generation

The Enterprise line of STATISTICA products is designed for multi-user, collaborative analysis applications. STATISTICA analytic procedures are deployed on a server and are architected for the simultaneous use by any number (tens, hundreds, thousands) of users.

Report generation is an important component of the STATISTICA Enterprise architecture. You can use report configurations and report generation in STATISTICA Enterprise to create formatted documents (PDF, HTML, MS Word) and analysis summaries of any of the tabular and graphical results produced by STATISTICA.

Business Applications

STATISTICA Enterprise is used in every industry for countless applications. Here are some example applications of STATISTICA Enterprise report generation:

Production of Standard, Formatted Reports

In a variety of industries, the documentation of ongoing analysis summaries for decision-making and historical record is a mandated aspect of doing business. For example, in FDA-regulated industries, standard reports are inherent to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) to demonstrate ongoing product quality monitoring and due diligence in determining potential trends and root causes. These Annual or Periodic Product Reviews (APRs/PPRs) mandated for GMP compliance can be time-consuming to produce. STATISTICA Enterprise streamlines the time to produce APRs/PPRs, allowing Quality Control personnel to focus on the review of the historical charts, and reduces the potential for errors in the analyses in the charts by automating the process.

Delivery of Snapshots and Updates to Consumers of Information

In any enterprise, there are active, "power" users of STATISTICA, and the periodic consumers of information whose responsibilities and needs require that they are informed of the "big picture." For the consumers of information, who need to always be aware of "what happened yesterday", batch report summaries provide a convenient mechanism to stay informed. The report summaries can be waiting for the user when the user logs into the STATISTICA Knowledge Portal, posted to an Intranet site where the user can browse as needed, or can be automatically printed. For example, one of StatSoft's customers automatically prints a daily report every morning at 6AM for pickup by a key consumer for their review when they arrive at 7AM. The reports are in a standard format, so the review is streamlined to allow for the selection of focus on what the important issues of the day are.

Dashboards

One output of STATISTICA Enterprise reports are HTML documents with graphical results as JPEGs/PNGs/GIFs. The outputted HTML documents are often the sub-components feeding into a dashboard summary of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within an organization. The automatic scheduling of updates to the standard reports allow for the graphical summaries of KPIs to be refreshed at the desired frequency to suit the business need.

How It Works

Below is a summary of the details of STATISTICA Enterprise report generation, and the flexibility it provides as the report templating and generation mechanism within the STATISTICA Enterprise platform.

Analysis Automation

The STATISTICA Enterprise application platform includes the industry-standard STATISTICA Visual Basic (SVB) for analysis automation. The complete set of STATISTICA analyses and graphics are exposed for automation and macro recording. This analysis automation using STATISTICA Visual Basic is the first step in configuring a STATISTICA Report configuration.

Report Templating

STATISTICA Enterprise provides a graphical user interface for defining the layout of formatted documents, including the placement of graphs and tables, the contents and formatting of headers/footer, static and dynamic text elements, and any additional formatting elements specific to the document type. The results of the report template definition are saved as a STATISTICA Report template document. Importantly, these Report Templates are stored centrally, wrapped with user access control and security, in the STATISTICA Configurations Database, deployed on an industry-standard relational database management system (RDBMS).

Report Generation Engine

At the heart of STATISTICA Enterprise is the report generation engine. Its role is to retrieve the latest version of the respective report template, "pickup" the latest tabular and graphical results for the associated analyses, populate the report template with the latest results, and then lastly generate the output document in the desired format. It handles all of these steps automatically.

Scheduling and Batching

STATISTICA Enterprise may either be run on-demand or as batch, scheduled tasks. Both approaches have their place for respective applications within an Enterprise.

With on-demand report, users may be prompted to input application options. For example, with Annual Product Review reports, the user may be prompted to select a Product and a Date Range.

For batch applications, STATISTICA Enterprise has its own batch scheduler for configuring the timing and frequency for each individual report. It supports batch scheduling via the Windows AT Scheduler.

Reports Delivery

STATISTICA Enterprise delivers updated reports documents to a designated location. By default, the location is the STATISTICA Knowledge Portal, a secure document repository integrated into STATISTICA Enterprise's access control and security infrastructure. The STATISTICA Knowledge Portal allows for the organized, browsing of the latest reports to which a respective user has permissions.

Additionally, STATISTICA Enterprise Manager has output options for

1. printing reports,
2. creating reports in HTML, PDF, and RTF formats,
3. saving as WebSTATISTICA reports, and
4. emailing reports.