Answer your own questions with Self Service BI

Clear Analytics’ mission is to empower you to remove the middleman and build a ‘direct line’, connecting novice business users to company data. Only 30% of businesses have the ability to access company data in today’s business world, but Clear Analytics aims to increase that number to 100% by introducing powerful self-service tools. In doing so, it radically increases the turnaround by leaving the ability to create and maintain reports in your hands.

Clear Analytics + Power BI = Incredible power

Microsoft’s Power BI featureset gives Excel capabilities that have been long sought after by data analysts—the ability to exceed the 1 million row limit with PowerPivot, visualize data over geographical locations with Power Map, view interactive visualizations using Power View or transform data effortlessly with Power Query. Clear Analytics permits effortless extraction of data from your trusted sources and enables this data to be leveraged by any and all of the Power BI Feature sets.

In fact, Clear Analytics can even publish your enterprise datasets to the PowerBI.Com portal so that you may share your insights with an even greater audience! Learn More…

Data Access to all – Businesses gain more direct access to the data

Quite often, the implementation of a business intelligence platform drastically reduces the number of people who are able to gain access to the firm’s information. Consequently, the few who do adopt the platform inevitably become the organizational bottleneck and the gatekeepers who deliver data to everyone else, thus decreasing productivity. By allowing the users to continue to use what they know, Clear Analytics transforms every member of the organization into a 1st class business analytics citizen.

Powerful Automation – Eliminate manual preparation with dynamic refresh

Errors whilst manually updating spreadsheets can be costly to companies due to penalties, lost opportunities and even damages to the reputation that you uphold for your customers. Manually updating spreadsheets also takes time that can accumulate as your analytics needs inevitably grow and expand. To eliminate the hassle of manually updating your spreadsheets, Clear Analytics uniquely injects data whilst keeping your layout perfectly intact. This unique capability effectively separates the Excel templates from the data; hence, your templates can evolve freely while you dynamically refresh your daily changing data completely ‘hands-free’ into the spreadsheet. By maintaining a virtual link between the data on the spreadsheet and its data source, the quality of the data increases exponentially.

Business as usual with added analytical powers

Gartner cites that adoption is the single biggest point of failure when rolling out business intelligence; essentially, the “if you build it, they will come” model is not effective. Nor is spending $$$ on retraining staff on a whole new reporting solution that ultimately fails to impress businesses who often delegate analytical tasks to others or revert to using spreadsheets.

Clear Analytics is designed to make every Excel user a power analyst – no manual needed— whilst implementing robust enterprise strength features that ensure governance, accountability, security and scalability. Businesses also love the added power that Clear Analytics delivers to their existing knowledge of Excel because this denotes less wasted time on training courses; rather, you can just hit the ground running!

Governance & Centralization

Rest assured that business users have access to the golden enterprise source, every number can be traced back to the source and that individuals are accountable for all reporting. All reports and queries are stored centrally and are shared through a sophisticated entitlement layer. All changes are logged, version-controlled and fully auditable.

Consolidate data from anywhere

Combine data from a variety of different sources. Why spend time and money developing a Data Warehouse only to bring data together from disparate systems? Simply define the location of your data and let Clear Analytics retrieve it.

Clear Analytics introduces the latest concepts of a semantic layer to enable business users to fetch data elements from many different sources with ease. Once the data is organized on a spreadsheet, you can leverage all of Excel’s Power BI features to model, visualize and transform the data for the purpose of gaining the insights you need in order to progress in your business.

Share Data, not Spreadsheets

Clear Analytics’ revolutionary Data Share feature allows you to separate data from the spreadsheet and permit others access to it for their own analysis. Imagine simply decoupling the data locked in a spreadsheet to make it freely available for users to use and incorporate into their own reports. Data Share enables the data to be stored, maintained and managed independently of spreadsheets in a centralized, version-controlled and governed manner.

No longer will you have to lock spreadsheets in order to maintain data when multiple people are vying for access to the same file. Clear Analytics allows multiple people to edit, append and maintain data independently of spreadsheets.

Excel Made Safe and Secure

IT and compliance view Excel as a scary Pandora’s box that is filled with stale numbers and unverified logic. Whereas IT wishes to fix the broken numbers by implementing dedicated Business Intelligence solutions, compliance aspires to fix the problem of broken logic by procuring process specific off-the-shelf solutions or to leveraging traditional “software development” methodologies— both of which are very expensive propositions. Clear Analytics steps in to aid both of these areas by folding in peer reviews to ensure that there is operational oversight throughout the process of moving queries and reports from Private to Shared and eventually to Public.

Addressing the Risks of using Excel in business

The current business climate is rife with growing regulatory requirements coupled with extra stakeholder scrutiny. Excel is often seen as a hindrance to the overall mission of better transparency and control. However, Clear Analytics makes the spreadsheets accessible to IT and allows them to better provision updates to data. Additionally, all calculations and logic performed within the spreadsheets will now be available for examination by compliance and audit. Undeniably, this is an unprecedented level of openness that effectively eliminates the risk of using Excel for enterprise strength analytics.

Help IT & Compliance to help you

The current attitude towards Excel in the workplace is very black and white wherein the general idea is to either use Excel and your business remains at risk, or to not use Excel and spend $$$ on multiple dedicated systems. Clear Analytics proposes a fantastic middle ground: continue to use Excel with the added benefits of dynamic refresh and centralization and revel in the fact that both IT & Compliance now have visibility to the spreadsheets and facilitate the delivery of clean and correct data.

Reduce Risk & Increase Productivity

There are very few opportunities to kill two birds with one stone; Clear Analytics truly delivers in this respect by addressing two key concepts. Firstly, businesses gain true self-service business analytics advances within the tools they already know. Secondly, IT & Compliance can for the first time gain visibility into the spreadsheets used by the business and are able to identify errors to help reduce operational risk.

Better recovery and auditing

The centralization of spreadsheets enables a great number of additional capabilities that are virtually impossible with Excel alone or with SharePoint. Centralizing spreadsheets allows for version control, recovery from accidents due to corruption, overwriting or if you simply wish to rollback. Sharing and Collaboration is also achievable with a fine-grained suite of entitlements.

No more clogged mailboxes

Another great advantage of Clear Analytics is the ability to share information with your colleagues right within Excel. Your email administrators will be extremely pleased to see a crease in the distribution of spreadsheet attachments, this being considered one of the biggest perpetrators of clogged mailboxes.

Radically improve Data Quality and Delivery

Importing data extracts into spreadsheets means that IT can no longer deliver any updates or corrections that may occur thereafter. Clear Analytics creates a virtual link between the spreadsheet and your data source; therefore, the latest and most accurate data can be dynamically updated into spreadsheets with just the click of a button!
The days of orphaned data in spreadsheets are over because Clear Analytics always has knowledge about the origins of the data, when it was extracted and by whom. You can even see what filters were applied to the report so that you always have a high degree of context around the information that you are analyzing.

Systems and Controls

Clear Analytics radically reinforces Excel with security capabilities commonly found in enterprise-level reporting platforms. Protect your data with comprehensive security and ensure that only those that have permission can view your data. Fine grained access controls and full auditing of changes to artifacts means that you always know who changed what and when. Clear Analytics delivers a high level of accountability and traceability where there currently is none.

Full Traceability

Clear Analytics ensures that every number delivered onto a sheet is backed by a full audit trail of what query was used, who ran the report and what the parameters were. This unprecedented level of traceability means you can use Clear Analytics for even the most sensitive data uses.

Better Data Management

By keeping a full audit of all queries, reports and activities, IT can identify and inform users who may be impacted by any changes to your data landscape. Easily identify users that will be impacted by updates to data sources by performing “BI on BI” to pinpoint which reports will be impacted.

IT’s ability to mine the usage of the system is incredibly powerful, enabling IT to identify which portion of their data infrastructure is most used in order to help them prioritize where to focus their data stewardship efforts.

Streamline your workload

Empowering users to manage their own reporting needs allows IT to focus on the delivery of comprehensive and accurate data. As the variety of data grows beyond the firewall to numerous cloud services, IT can now refocus their efforts on improving data quality and data stewardship practices.

Unburden your Infrastructure

Clear Analytics fetches your data from a wide variety of sources and caches them so that reports are delivered to the user quickly and efficiently. This provides the added benefit of freeing your database from running hundreds of the repetitive queries. An additional benefit to accessing the cached data is that the retention of this data can be far beyond your current data warehouse retention abilities, thus storing report data for a much longer period of time for audit and compliance purposes.