Senior management and business analysts need to get the big picture of the business in order to see the broader trends.  They need aggregated data from right across the business and they need to see these trends broken down by any number of variables so they can answer questions such as:

• What is the total sale of each product category month-by-month and what is the year-on-year growth in each region?
• For each customer age group, what is the relative profitability of each product category?
• How does the profitability for this period compare to the same period in each of the last five years?
• Who are the top and bottom traders / dealers / salespeople / clients / partners / customers?
• What is our current exposure and how does that compare to our appetite to risk?

OLAP cubes provide you with answers to these questions and more. 

OLAP is a specialised database technology that has been optimised for querying and reporting.  Data is organised into hierarchical structures that reflect you business structure and the numbers are automatically pre-aggregated so you get answers to your queries extremely quickly.  By creating structures in the OLAP cube that reflect the reporting structures of your business means you can quickly answer sophisticated questions.

The best bit is that the power of an OLAP cube is available to every Microsoft Excel user. When connected to Excel, the OLAP cube simply becomes an Excel PivotTable which means your users have no need to learn new tools and techniques.  And because the OLAP server rather than Excel computes the summarised values, you can deal with vast quantities of data and the results are returned incredibly quickly.

Once published, an OLAP cube can meet all your ad-hoc reporting and analysis needs without the need to go back to the IT department with new report requests.

The following video show how you can browse a OLAP cube in Microsoft Excel. The demo shows how a PivotTable report can be used to query large amounts of data in a cross-tabular way with good performance. The demo is based on a fictitious company called Adventure Works to show how you can use an OLAP cubes for business intelligence. Play video of OLAP demo