Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is an important part of an ERP. Its gives an overview of your business data. It can show a broad overview in dashboards and charts but also dig deep into your numbers and key performance indicators (KPI).

For now this page starts as a result of a insightful discussion in the IDempiere_workshop_2025. See IDempiere_workshop_2025#BI to read the transscript of the BI discussion.

Our goal is to have a more useful interface for BI integration for different needs with examples and documentation. The goal is to have like a basic standard of BI capabilities and best practices to use some tools. That allows users to get fast access to these tools and allows implementors to build on that to adapt it to special needs. This shall be so easy and standardized that we use it even in the demo servers of the iDempiere project to get a better first impression experience for new users.

This page (hopefully) will collect results of our work on these parts:

build an BI interest group

Layda Salas initiated this effort and wanted to lead this group. In the workshop Juan Carlos Lin and Thomas Bayen were interested to join the group. Carlos Ruiz liked to join also. We invite everyone with ideas and knowledge to write to us and join.

Our firsst meeting will be tuesday, 27.5.25 15:00 UTC (17:00 CET/Hungary/Germany, 12:00 Paraguay). You are welcome.

use cases

Define use cases for examples

new dimensions

My experience is that as more columns a data cube has as more useful and powerful a visual tool like Superset becomes.

Do we need new dimensions in core?

TBayen and Juan Carlos had some ideas. CarlosRuiz wants to include some of them into core tables if we agree that these are useful. But we will also have to think how we integrate other columns.

• Brand of a product

define tables and cubes

We want to define basic queries that can be used as a basic dataset for several usage areas by our BI software. These queries should not only be an example for GardenWorld but solve 80% of the average customer's needs. They are extendable by implementors for special needs.

implementation details

One part of that question is technical: How do we implement that? On the conference workshop in Budapest the attendees agreed that we create a database view as a base definition of columns. Depending on needs, size and resources of the erp implementation one can:

• use that as it is (seems good enough for an example in GardenWorld),
• change it to a materialized view (more useful for real implementations),
• copy it to special tables as a data cube (allows indexing, compression, grouping, etc.),
• or to a specialized BI database server (like Gaurav Sontakke showd us in the Conference 2025 where he uses the proprietary Snowflake database).

capabilities of iDempiere

The queries should be prepared for the advanced capabilites of iDempiere: multi-tenant (do not allow to mix data of other tenants), multi-user (do we want access rights to data?), multi-currency, etc.

defined base tables

The more interesting part (for our BI interest group) is: Which kind of tables/cubes we want to define to help in our use cases:

• Sales
• Purchases
• Material
• Costing
• Human Resources
• Accounting

It may (or may not) be useful to add data cubes, what is a densed version of some of the given views (e.g. monthly turnover) to speed up things and show how to use these.

Tools

These tools can be used to analyze and visualize the data.

• internal charts
• QuickInfo (can be used for context aware analysis)
• Superset
• Metabase
• Pentaho
• LibreOffice Base

It seems that Layda wants to create an example configuration for Superset. Our goal is to get that working so well that it will be included in the demo servers.

BI plugin

We want to have a plugin that includes missing dimensions (if not in core), the views and cubes and some charts examples and QuickInfo examples.

Demo server

Our goal is to include our working solution into the Jenkins scripts that start our demo server.

A missing part is to have demo data. As Carlos told us there is a plugin that creates demo data but we did not try out until now.

Also missing is to check and fill more data to get good dimensions (including our added dimensions) with useful data so the demo can be as impressive as it can.