Glossary

One-off, “on demand” reports that can be easily created within BI software and quickly answers a specific business question that has arisen unexpectedly.

Formed or calculated by the combination of many separate units or items. For example, it’s a big part of financial analysis and often finance people use a platform to collate internal and external market to make recommendations and predictions about the company’s financial future.

The systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. Phocas data analytics lets you dig into a consolidated view of your actual product, customer and financial data.

Computer code that allows two software programs to communicate with each other.

A performance management tool that holistically captures an organization’s performance from several vantage points (e.g. sales results vs. inventory levels) on a single page.

Using data about people’s behaviour to understand intent and predict future actions.

Extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.

A technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help executives, business managers and purchasing managers make more informed business decisions.

A structuring of big data that attaches situational contexts to single elements of big data to enrich them with business meaning.

Denoting strategies and software that enable a company to organize and optimize its customer relations.

A graphical summary of various pieces of important information, typically used to give an overview of a business. Phocas dashboards allow you to see at a glance how your business is performing with an option to go deeper into the underlying data sitting behind the dashboard.

Data analysis is the process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modelling data to uncover actionable intelligence. It’s a key process in business intelligence.

A data structure than contains the information about a specific database that an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver needs in order to connect to it.

A large store of data accumulated from a wide range of sources within a company and used to guide management decisions.

A structured collection of facts and statistics set of data held in a computer, especially one that is accessible in various ways.

An enterprise resource management system which manages information and resources involved in a company’s operations.

Three separate functions combined into a single programming tool. First, the extract function reads data from a specified source database and extracts a desired subset of data. Next, the transform function works with the acquired data – using rules or lookup tables, or creating combinations with other data – to convert it to the desired state. Finally, the load function is used to write the resulting data (either all of the subset or just the changes) to a target database, which may or may not previously exist.

A prediction or estimate of future events.

Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a combination of financial activities that support an organization's financial health: planning and budgeting, reporting, and forecasting and modeling. FP&A solutions enhance the finance department's ability to manage performance by linking corporate strategy to execution.

An easy digital dashboard of key metrics that is easy to filter, edit and explore to focus on the data that is most important to your team and company.

Technology enables the exploration of data via the manipulation of chart images, with the color, brightness, size, shape and motion of visual objects representing aspects of the dataset being analysed. These products provide an array of visualization options that go beyond those of pie, bar and line charts, including heat and tree maps, geographic maps, scatter plots and other special-purpose visuals.

Is a methodology that involves the client or end user in the design and development of an application, through a succession of collaborative workshops called JAD sessions.

A quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee in meeting objectives for performance.

The use of a computer program, a database, the Internet, or a specialized service to obtain or receive information for the purpose of expanding the scope of business, increasing sales revenues, looking for a job or for new clients or conducting specialized research.

A computerized information-processing system designed to support the activities of company or organizational management.

A method of measuring something, or the results obtained from this: ‘the report provides various metrics at the class and method level.’

Software that extends desktop business intelligence applications so they can be used on a mobile device. Phocas is a fully mobile software solution that allows access to your data, dashboards and reports wherever you are on smartphones and tablets.

Refers to activities within a company or supply chain that do not directly contribute to satisfying end consumers’ requirements. It is useful to think of these as activities that consumers would not be happy to pay for.

Computer processing that enables a user to easily and selectively extract and view data from different points of view.

A class of software programs capable of supporting transaction-oriented applications on the internet.

An open standard application programming interface (API) for accessing a database.

a standard for the hardware of a computer system, which determines which kinds of software it can run. For example, Phocas can be delivered via cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS), private cloud or on premise.

A method of regulating access to computer or network resources based on the roles of individual users within an enterprise.

A brief look or summary. A record of the contents of a storage location or data file at a given time.

A software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over the internet.

An international standard for database manipulation.

The oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer.

The concept of forming one enterprise-wide view of the customer across all customer contact channels (i.e., sales, marketing, and customer service and support). It is a complex area, requiring complex solutions to problems of integration, data flow, data access and marketing strategy. A critical component is the database that serves as the customer information repository.

The character string that identifies an Internet document’s exact name and location.