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Welcome back to the Getting Started with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery v3.0 screencast series.
This is the beginning of Part 2 -- Getting Started Application Overview.
This screencast will provide an overview of the Getting Started Studio application, as well as introduce you to some key concepts within Studio.
To see the entire playlist of screencasts in this series, click here (YouTube annotation.)
As mentioned in the previous screencast, the discovery applications within Studio give you access and freedom to explore the information
using search and interactive visualizations, allowing you to uncover previously unknown relationships in the data and gain new insights.
When you first log into Studio, you will see the Discovery Applications
page. This is where you can see a list of applications you can access.
Applications can be community or certified. Certified applications are those that a Studio administrator has certified.
Community applications have not been certified.
My Applications lists those applications for which you are an application administrator.
For demonstration purposes today, we will be using the Getting Started application which uses sales and product data from a fictitious bicycle
manufacturer for the years 2010 through 2012. I will show you how advanced exploration of the data can lead to new insights and better
business decisions. It is intended to be a way for you to experience Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and get
you up and running quickly. It is not, however, intended to prescribe our best practices on how to build an application, nor is it intended to
demonstrate all of our features.
An application such as this can be built quickly, and this screencast series will show you how.
With minimal development effort or IT involvement, you can enable casual business users to engage in open-ended problem solving
across all relevant data.
The application contains four pages: a default 'New Workspace' page that is created every time you create a new application, and 3 pages
custom made for the Getting Started application: Sales Overview, Resellers, and Products.
Let me show you a few ways you can explore this data.
A page labeled 'New Workspace' is automatically created with each new application.
You can rename it and redesign it however you want.
The left column contains a search box, breadcrumbs, and guided navigation, that you'll notice is consistent across all 4 pages.
In the middle of the page, a Results Table is displayed. It is currently set up to display product information
organized by sales order and sales order line number.
There are a total of 60,117 records, and the table is currently displaying 20 records per page.
We are viewing page 1 of 3006 pages.
Notice we can use this drop-down menu to select another value -- such as Sales Transaction.
The table was updated to display sales transaction information, but still organized by sales order and sales order number.
Use the scroll bar to scroll over to see additional columns.
You can use the View Options to hide columns if desired.
Use Guided Navigation to refine the data displayed. For example, under Sale Geography, I can refine the data displayed by Country.
Here I can see the number of records associated with each country. there are 38,305 records with sales in the United
States. If I refine on United States, the page refreshes the table to display only those records with sales in the United States.
And if we were interested in seeing all the records associated with North America, we could just add Canada.
Lets say we want to exclude records for sales in fiscal year 2010. We can do that too.
The breadcrumbs keep track of our current constraints.
We can remove any of these refinements individually, or delete them all at once.
You can name the pages whatever you like. I'll rename this one Sales Order Detail.
And you can reorder your pages easily too, just by dragging it to a new location.
To view a different page, just click its tab. The Sales Overview page displays a dashboard view of the Bike Store sales information.
The Metrics Bar and the Alerts components give a quick, visual indication of sales growth.
For example, the green background in the metrics bar indicates that our Sales Growth number exceeds its target, which is set to 25%.
The charts let us analyze our sales numbers in different ways.
For example, the left chart shows that Linda Mitchell has the highest sales of all of the employees.
And the right chart highlights that United States has the highest sales ,
followed by Canada and France.
By looking at the pivot table, we are quickly able to assess that this bike manufacturer has been established in the United States and Canada
since 2010,
however, it has only recently expanded operations to Europe and Australia.
So, let's say that we want to find out how the employees on our sales team are performing.
In the chart, I can choose to sort in ascending or descending order. We can easily identify that Syed is the lowest
performing sales Employee.
However, a closer look at Syed's chart indicates that he only has sales numbers for 2012
which means that he's a relatively new employee. If we want to find more information about his performance in 2012, we can filter the
results by 2012.
• Not only has 2012 been added to the bread crumbs, just as if I had navigated by Fiscal Year in the guided navigation,
• but the graph has also cascaded down to the next level of granularity and is displaying total sales by quarter in 2012.
Now we can see that Syed's sales started stronger in Q1, but have dropped in later quarters, so we may want to reach out to his
manager to discuss these findings. Now, from this same chart, I may decide to analyze my total sales by product subcategory
and fiscal quarter. In 2012, I can see that bikes had the highest sales.
The first bar represents sales of touring bikes, and the third bar represents sales of mountain bikes.
If I hover my mouse over the second bar, I can see this represents sales of Road bikes.
The graph on the right indicates that the majority of Sales was in United States.
Now, if I remove 2012 from my filter,
I'll see that overall sales for the Touring product line is considerably less.
By analyzing this by Fiscal Year, I can conclude that Touring's overall sales are much lower because it was just added to the
inventory in 2012, while Mountain bikes and Road bikes have been sold all 3 years.
Switching gears a bit, let's say I want to find my top resellers for road bikes in 2012.
I can first drill into the intersection of Road and 2012 from within the chart,
which filters me down to the data I care about. Then, I can view the Resellers page, and see my top 10 resellers mapped by their
location. Note that my filter state was unchanged, allowing me to drill sideways across the data.
From here, I decide to focus on a particular location, such as Boston, Massachusetts. By doing a location search for Boston, Mass, I can
view the top resellers in that region.
Toggling my sort from highest to lowest sales
highlights 3 resellers in this area that each have less than $2000 in total
sales. I might decide to drop these resellers and focus on other resellers that are bringing in more sales.
Let's go explore Products a bit. I'll clear my filter state and go over to the Products tab.
The tag cloud highlights the top product name. By hovering my mouse over the top product name, I can see that Mountain-200 black bike
was my single top selling product overall. The tag cloud also displays the category of this product, and its total sales.
The chart shows us both the sales sum of our products, as well as the average standard cost.
The colors in the graph represent the Product Category Name. It is easy to see that bikes produce the highest sales.
The size of the bubbles within the chart represent montly profit.
So by hovering the mouse over the large bubbles in the top right quadrant, the names of the products with the hightest monthly profit and
hightest sales are displayed.
Bubbles in the lower right quadrant represent items with high average cost but low sales.
And the small bubbles represent the lowest monthly profit.
You may want to focus on products in this area to see what can be done to make them more profitable, or consider removing them from the
product line.
For example, by hovering the mouse over the smallest bubble in this quadrant, a pop-up appears indicating this bubble represents the
Touring 1000 Yellow
bike. It displays the average standard cost, sales sum, and montly profit.
Since the monthly profit is a large negative value, this product definitely needs management's attention.
Below we see basically the same information in table format, with the addtion of one random customer survey response for each product.
All customer survey responses are in the data, and can be viewed later.
The table can be sorted by any column, in either ascending or decending order.
Up until now, I've demonstrated how end users can use Oracle Endeca Information Discovery to discover new insights about their data.
Users designated as power users have the additional capability of composing these applications for their end users.
Power users can add new pages
and configure each component using the Configuration
menu. If you notice, the Guided Navigation on this page looks a little different from the Guided Navigation on other pages.
Each one has been designed to work with the type of data displayed on that page. Here we see Date attributes first, followed by Product
attributes, followed by Sales Transaction attributes.
On the Resellers page, Guided Navigation begins with Date attributes, followed by Reseller attributes, followed by Sale Geography.
For example, in Guided Navigation, I have a variety of configuration and display options.
I may choose to modify the order of the attribute groups.
• I can move the Sale Geography Attribute group higher in the list
• I can choose to hide the Product attribute group altogether •
And I can choose to collapse Date attribute group by default.
The Guided Navigation is then updated for the end users the next time they view the application.
Future screencasts in this series will go into much more detail on configuring pages and components.
Users can rapidly and iteratively deploy applications like the Getting Started Studio application, incorporating data from multiple
disparate sources into easily consumable, interactive online experiences.
In this screencast, you received an overview of the Getting Started Studio application, and learned about some key concepts within Studio.
The next screencast in the series will provide an overview of the Getting Started Integrator component, as well as introduce you to some
key concepts within Integrator.