Dundas BI

Opmerkingen: I've been working in Business Intelligence for quite a long time and in the beginning it was hard to explore data and show information in form of data visualizations for the end users. Since I discovered Dundas BI, this task turned to be much more simple and easy to achieve! Dundas Bi has an IDE for developing Dashboards, Reports and Scorecards that uses the last technologies in web applications developments which makes your life simplier. The smart drag and drop design tools, the rich set of data visualizations customizable to the lowermost detail, the style and themes feature, turns possible to create rich and interactive dashboards in a breeze! Dundas BI comes with an ETL (Export , Transform and Load) layer, where you can clean and prepare your data, this is done using a canvas where you can drag your tables from a data source, choose the columns you want, aggregate them, join with other tables, filter and a lot of interesting features regarding the ETL process. It connects to a lot of data sources: Oracle, Microsoft SqlServer, Excel files, ... It is a collaborative tool, with scheduled reports, based on a metric or not, you can even annotate data points, writing a comment on it in a way that others can see and respond to it! Every view can be exported to excel, pdf, image and even powerpoint. The management of the software is in the form all in one! every thing is done in the application, from user creation object permissions, overall configuration, project exporting/importing and management!

Pluspunten: The drag and drop feature for creating views is a very productive feature. The ETL is also great, it's easy to use and, for more advanced users, it evens permits to write direct sql against tha data source you choose. Regarding performance it has two possibilities, you can cache in memory or in DBI data warehouse. The collaborative feature of this tool is a must to have feature, I specially like the data driven notification option that could alert you by email when a specific metric goes behind a threshold or state.

Minpunten: It needs to take a step further and aboard predicted analytics!

Pluspunten: Dundas is a conglomeration of expertly coded dashboard development tools and infrastructures. The thing I like most about Dundas is that they are very helpful, the gentleman assigned to me to educate me in the ways of Dundas, was one I will never forget to this day, he was calm, helpful, understanding and with his help I learned Dundas in no time. I like the way Dundas structure's its Dashboard development, it starts with virtual tables, where the programmer can manually or automatically generate SQL queries, these queries are then used for the basis of adding statistical flavour to the Dashboard, the way this is done is very straight forward. Dundas has a steep unforgiving learning curve, but when you master the fundamentals, the sky really is the limit. Also their support service is world class, the representatives will assist you in any way they can, they will help you understand what the issue you are facing is and provide a resolution. If they cant help you via email, they will 'WebEx' you, i.e skype call with 2 way screen control. Everything in Dundas is customizable, charts, graphs and other statistical data can be glossed up and made to look as simple or as plush as the user envisions. You can add formulae, trend analysis and other key statistical methods are employed by Dundas. They have charts for Finance, Risk analysis and other key statistical methodologies. All of these charts can be jazzed up with scripts so that you can Drill down and filter through the data you want in order to get the right Business Intelligence feel to your work. Dundas supports the Data Cube, It supports Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL, EXCEL, it has export capabilities onto Excel, so those clients which prefer their data in Spreadsheets can manually export directly from the dashboard. Everything in Dundas is designed to give you the most professional feel possible at all times!

Minpunten: Dundas, for the good of it's users needs to publish more comprehensive educational equipment to train it's users, it is very hard to get to an expert level in Dundas without some help from your Friends in Dundas. I would love to see Dundas publish university style lectures, with step by step guides that show every aspect of the working sphere. With adequate educational material, one would be able to gain adept or even artisan status with the Tool on their own.

Opmerkingen: I think overall, I would not rule out Dundas, even with it's so called quirks. Dundas staff showed very much that they listen to users, even those that haven't purchased and have taken my criticisms to heart. Since we're not talking about a 2017 Toyota car or whatever, I feel it's important to note the constant evolution of any progressive software company. The complaints stated could be obsolete in a mere few weeks.

Pluspunten: Dundas seems to really understand the need of handling big data and the tools needed to process these overwhelming mountains of 1's and 0's into actionable data. While working with the demo of Dundas I was able to create a very helpful tree-map that showed me the dissection of purchases comparatively from vendor to vendor to evaluate our performance or "loyalty" per vendor by item category and so on.

Minpunten: The U.I. of Dundas, while quite robust, seems to concern me in regards to the amount of boxes, checks, and clicks and long clicks I have to make to merely navigate my way through the program. I would rather see more keyboard shortcuts and less "Windows Vista" popups that slow my work. I felt like the settings I would implement would get lost. For instance, I would filter the vendors that weren't pertinent to my particular evaluation, then also the item categories that I wasn't interested in working with. Later on, when in the final building of the dashboard I wanted to add a checkbox filter to allow the end user to select individual item categories and be able to view 1 or all 20-30 at a time. Strangely, even though I filtered (or so I though) this data in the data cube level, I realized that the checkbox list populated with ALL the categories. This was quite frustrating. Also, I have yet to figure out how to go from an unfinished dashboard back to the data metrics screen where I built the KPI to start with. Unless i'm mistaken, it seems you have to go back to your saved metric set and then create a new dashboard after edits. Hopefully I'm wrong in my assessment of this but even so, the answer did not seem to be intuitive .

Opmerkingen: We have years of data that need mined. This requires the stakeholders to play with the data. We can give them all the metrics we can define, but when a user gets the chance to turn the data on its side and inside out, and then when they can bounce it around between each other, mark it up and change the visualizations on demand, it allows them to work from intuition. We are striving to help our users work from intuition, as well as from logic, to make observations; and, Dundas BI offers the ability to feed intuition.

Pluspunten: Dundas BI is a solid platform: it's more than a tool. With solid row-level security, a hefty selection of visualizations and the opportunity to present our user base with the ability to play with data, they won our vote. We compared them against: Tableau, Sisense, Domo and iDashboards. These comparative products had strengths as well, but when we made our decision, it was because Dundas gives our end users great control over visualizing what they see without unnecessary programming as well as our ability to use native SQL views we've already written with no need for modification. This in tandem with row-level security that we control at the data level made a perfect fit for our organization.

Minpunten: I like to get up and going intuitively. There wasn't a quick-start guide on how to create your first dashboard: it was pieces of learning. Having now gone through the majority of their 100-level and 200-level courses and having created a number of assets, I can see why Dundas wants you to do their training...but for heavy programming go-getters, I wish there had been a quick document to start. They did, however, respond amazingly as they hit my demands for learning head on and answered my questions rapidly, even assigning me access to a technician for a few days while I was in crunch mode.

Opmerkingen: We needed a self-service BI solution that would cover manufacturing operations dashboards and use cases. We wanted a tool that would allow for the distribution of centralized common dashboards but also allow for self-service customization. It needed to connect to multiple disparate data sources, and provide native ETL. It also needed to allow for real-time refresh capability. Finally, it needed to be affordable and scalable to our global operations footprint. DundasBI was the only solution that checked all of these boxes, and so far the tool has been a great help to reducing external spend and internal, custom-coded solutions.

Pluspunten: -Real-time dashboard refresh capability
-Built-in ETL
-Flexible seat types and affordable licensing
-Superior flexibility and customization, without the need for coding
-Out of the box performance and usage tracking

Minpunten: Customization and flexibility come at the cost of a steeper learning curve compared to other solutions.