The NGS Business Performance Dashboard is a complete information delivery solution that gives an organization the ability to view, present, and interact with live business data in a flexible, graphical format from a Web browser. Dashboard presentations can include charts, tables, gauges, calendars, maps, and other visualization tools to help make business information easy to see, understand, and analyze at a glance.

Financial reports, management scorecards, sales performance presentations, board-level reports, and other critical information can be quickly transformed from static numbers into dynamic, interactive presentations that support filtering along various business dimensions, what-if analysis, and more. No programming is required. In fact, most dashboard designers are business analysts with Microsoft® Excel skills and a feel for how best to graphically represent the underlying business data. End users can point and click their way through the dashboards with ease.

What’s Included

The NGS Business Performance Dashboard includes a development module for dashboard creators, a license to distribute the dashboards to users, plus a starter kit of over 100 dashboards to help you manage the following areas:

• Sales
• Customer Relationship Management
• Finance
• Human Resources
• Customer Service
• Inventory
• Marketing
• Production

Each of these sample presentations comes with all the objects needed to support further development and deployment. Customization is easy, and the results are stunning.

How It Works

The NGS Business Performance Dashboard leverages NGS-IQ™, IBM i (AS/400) DB2, Microsoft Excel, and Adobe® Flash Player. In addition to creating dashboards, you can also use this tool to create Web portals, custom Web reporting menus, and Web pages that serve as run-time input panels to NGS-IQ queries.

NGS-IQ queries extract the needed data and create the XML files and Excel sheets linked to the dashboards. Developers design the dashboards by choosing the graphic components to present the data. Then, they export the dashboards as Adobe Flash files that can be displayed, distributed via e-mail, or published on any Web server.

Dashboards also can be exported to HTML; Microsoft PowerPoint™, Outlook™, Word, and SharePoint™; and Adobe PDF.

Users can instantly take advantage of the dashboard design to view charts and maps as well as filter and analyze the data. Developers can design dashboards to update when a user clicks on a refresh button or to update automatically when the supporting queries are processed through a job scheduling utility.

Software Requirements

The NGS Business Performance Dashboard development environment requires NGS-IQ, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Excel Professional Edition 2003 or higher, and the royalty-free Adobe Flash Player software.

Dashboard viewers may run older versions of Windows but need a Web browser and the Flash Player. They do not need the NGS Business Performance Dashboard development software or Microsoft Excel.

Security

You may deploy your finished dashboards from the Integrated File System (IFS) of the IBM i which gives you the ability to use familiar IBM i security functions to control access. By using different folders of the IFS to store dashboard data intended for different users and/or locations, multiple users can share a dashboard but only view their data.

About NGS

NGS, a Premier IBM Business Partner, has been providing information solutions for IBM’s midrange computing platforms since 1982. NGS’s business intelligence and enterprise reporting solutions are used worldwide by thousands of private and public sector enterprises of all sizes. These organizations have successfully deployed the NGS-IQ solution to meet data access needs ranging from query and reporting to OLAP and data warehousing.

NGS provides toll-free technical support, software maintenance, online training videos, and formal classrooom training to ensure its customers can use their NGS software effectively.

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NGS-IQ is a trademark of New Generation Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.