The Statistic Analytic Reporter

1. Overview

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. An important component of the STATISTICA Enterprise architecture is the STATISTICA Analytic Reporter. The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter allows report configurations and report generation in STATISTICA Enterprise to deliver formatted documents (PDF, HTML, MS Word) and analysis summaries of any of the tabular and graphical results produced by STATISTICA.

2. Business Applications

The STATISTICA Enterprise software is used in every industry for countless applications so a comprehensive overview of the myriad ways in which the STATISTICA Analytic Reporter is used is not possible. In short, the STATISTICA Analytic Reporter is used for the following categories of applications:

2.1. 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. The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter 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.

2.2. 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.

2.3. Dashboards One output of the STATISTICA

Analytic Reporter are HTML documents with graphical results as JPEGs/PNGs/GIFs. The HTML documents outputted by the STATISTICA Analytic Reporter 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.

3. How It Works

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

3.1. 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.

3.2. Report Templating

The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter 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).

3.3. Report Generation Engine

At the heart of the STATISTICA Analytic Reporter 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. The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter handles all of these steps automatically.

3.4. Scheduling and Batching

The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter 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, the STATISTICA Analytic Reporter has its own batch scheduler for configuring the timing and frequency for each individual report. The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter also supports batch scheduling via the Windows AT Scheduler.

3.5. Reports Delivery

The STATISTICA Analytic Reporter delivers updated reports documents to a designated. 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.