Fusion Power!

As some of you have already experienced, ClicData has many powerful features to prepare data for efficient visualization: you can clean your data, merge data from different sources or transform your data for example by adding a calculated column, etc.

One feature that our users requested is Data Fusion and I’d like to use this blog to tell you a bit more about 3 different use cases in which this feature has helped speed up the creation of outstanding business dashboards.

Situation 1: Marketing consultants managing different websites for their clients

More and more marketing specialists enjoy ClicData marketing dashboards. First, because the improved interactive format is great for their clients, should they be internal or external… they simply like to play, zoom in and out, filter and all. Another reason for selecting ClicData is to avoid wasting time with the actual preparation of the reports so that they can focus more on their analysis and sell additional services.

The data fusion feature brings Google Analytics data from different clients of the agency into one single data source which will feed the dashboards. No need to duplicate dashboards anymore from different data sets! The same dashboard will display each site’s results via the same indicators to each client upon a client ID parameter. Simple & efficient!

Here is more information on how ClicData has helped marketing professionals rock their reporting.

Situation 2: Financial controllers consolidating budget numbers from different countries

If you sit in the headquarters of your company and you are in charge of bringing budget numbers together (as it typically happens at this time of the year), you will recognize the pain: you work for hours on polishing the ideal Excel structure before sharing it with each local team and here is what happens when you get the files back:

• One team decided to add their own columns
• Another one deleted some of the original columns
• Columns names were renamed by others
• Duplicated in certain cases
• and, in some rare cases, everything has been completed as instructed!

The data fusion feature will help you bring all the Excel files together and consolidate them into one master data set giving you the ability to match columns on the fly with the effect of satisfying both your global structure on the local inputs. No time wasted on reviewing line by line. No risk of manual mistakes. Visual & reliable!

Situation 3: Display Point of Sale data from different servers

In a perfect world, the data you need to create meaningful dashboards would be sitting right next to you, ready to be plugged, easy to digest and shown consistently. Reality is quite different and ClicData is there to help you with it all. Take advantage of:

• Many data connectors to easily import your data regardless of format and location
• ETL features to prep your data for smarter visualization
• Tailor-made widgets for displaying efficiently different types of data (date, price, quantity…)
• and the data fusion feature!

With it, you can connect to the different servers running in local points of sale and fusion all data coming from those databases but now all consolidated into one single table. Déjà vu? With the data fusion, you get to set things up once and automate the updates. Dashboards made easy!

As you can see in the image below data fusion will allow you to bring data together in a column structure:

Not to confuse with the Data merge which is another great data related feature to bring together data from different sources in one single table based on a common key. It makes the data look like this:

Any questions on data matters, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Business Analysts: they LOVE this stuff!

Happy dashboarding!