KPI’s are quantifiable measures that represent critical success factors, and analysts use them to measure company performance over time, against a predefined goal.
For example, sales profit, Revenue Growth, and Growth in Customer base are good KPI Candidates. KPIs are typically used as part of a strategic performance measurement framework, commonly known as a business scorecard.
Components of a KPI
Value– indicates the current level of business(sales amount). current value of my business (MDX calculations)
Goal—What is my business goal
For example: by next year, l need to have 40% increase in sales amount when compared to this year (MDX calculations)
Status-Shows how is your progress towards your goal–by comparing your current value with your goal -1 0 1
Trend- Indicates what is the present trend of your business during these period.
(the trend expression is used to compare the current status value with the value of status at a previous point in time)
To retrieve a KPI from the cube using MDX for example the adventureworks cube
SELECT {
KPIValue(“Reseller Sales”),
KPIGoal(“Reseller Sales”),
KPIStatus(“Reseller Sales”),
KPITrend(“Reseller Sales”)}
ON COLUMNS,
[Product].[Product Category].Members ON ROWS
FROM [Cube Name]
WHERE [DATE].[Calendar].[Calendar].&[2006]
Actions
They can extend the cube in versatile ways.
For example, suppose that a user has drilled down to the lowest level of the product dimension and wants to see the individual sales orders placed for that product. If the order information is not stored in the cube, you can implement a reporting action that lets the user request an SSRS report that displays the order data from another system.
you can define several actions types to integrate your cube with client applications.
* Regular actions/Standard actions: multipurpose actions that can retrieve information from different places. (Dataset, rowset, proprietary, urls)
* DrillThough Actions: Let the client request the details behind aggregated cell values in the cube. This is the only action type that the client application can send to SSAS for execution.
*Reporting Actions : can be used to request SSRS reports. The action command is the URL report path along with the optional report parameters.
