Ranking

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Whereas filters limit the rows returned in accordance with specific selection criteria, normally from dimension variables, Apply Ranking enables you to limit the rows according to top or bottom values of measures. When you apply a ranking, you apply it in terms of the dimension you are trying to analyze. The following table gives some business questions that show which dimension and variable you would base the ranking on:

Business Question

Dimension Variable

Measure to Rank

Which business units have the highest expense variance?

Business Unit

Expense Variance

What are the top-selling products?

Product

Sales Quantity

Which customers generate the most revenues?

Customer

Sales Revenue

Which warehouses have the most product on hand?

Warehouse

Inventory

Which wine producers produce the highest-rated wines?

Producer

Rating

Which years have yielded the highest-rated wines?

Vintage

Rating

In the following steps, you learn which producers make the highest-rated wines:

  1. From the Slice and Dice Panel, select the Producer variable within the Block Structure.

  2. Click Apply Ranking.  

  3. BusinessObjects displays a Select Top/Bottom for Producer dialog box. Select Top and enter a number. For example, to see the Top 10 Producers, enter 10. If you wanted to select the lowest-rated wines, or the lowest-priced wines, you would choose Bottom and change the Based On value.

    click to expand

  4. In the drop-down box Based On, BusinessObjects displays only measure variables. Select which measure variable you want the ranking to be based on—in this example, Rating.

  5. If you have already added calculations in the report, such as Average and Maximum, BusinessObjects will continue to display these. If you want sums and percentages added to the report, select these two options. With Ratings, sums have no meaning, so leave these options blank.

  6. Click OK to close the Select Top/Bottom dialog box.

  7. From within the Slice and Dice Panel, click Apply to filter the number of rows according to the ranking.

As shown in the following report, if there is a tie for the 10th ranking (or whichever value you specified), then BusinessObjects displays more than ten rows—in this example, 12 Producers:

click to expand

Note 

The Apply Ranking function works only on the rows within the local document, so it is a ranking within a subset of data. If you want a genuine ranking based on all the data in the source data, this must be set up at query time either via an advanced object that includes the Rank function, or as a workaround, by limiting the number of rows returned in the query. Refer to Chapter 10 or Chapter 22 for more information.

About Ranking Calculations

In applying rankings, you can elect to display the ranking according to a percentage. This percentage relates to the number of values in the dimension you are applying the ranking. It does not relate the percentage contribution from a particular measure column (for example, which products generate 10 percent of the revenues). This is quite different to the way a measure object that uses the RANK function works. For example, if you have a list of 100 wine producers, ten percent of this is 10 producers. If your document contains 200,000 product IDs, one percent of this is 2000 product IDs. To apply ranking by a percentage of the dimensional values, select the option In percentage total number of values in the Select Top/Bottom dialog box.

As an example, refer to the first few rows in the following table. The table on the left contains 20 Category items. Ten percent of this is two, so only two category items will be selected when a ranking is added according to the percentage total number of values. The top two categories according to sales revenue are shown in the top right report. Jewelry accounts for 76 percent of the top-ranked sales or 36 percent of all sales in the report. Belts, bags, wallets is the second highest-ranked category. In the bottom-right table, the ranking is by quantity sold. Jewelry is still the top ranked, but the percentage from quantity sold is now 35 percent. Evening wear replaces Belts, bags, wallets as the number-two-ranked category according to the quantity sold.

click to expand

Caution 

In certain circumstances in BusinessObjects versions 5.1.4–5.1.6, Ranking may return incorrect results. This has been identified as a bug, with a fix scheduled for patch 5.1.7.

The preceding table makes it fairly easy to understand how ranking works. However, the ranking feature becomes even more powerful when it is incorporated into a table that contains multiple break levels in which it is not so easy to immediately identify the top performers. For example, refer back to Figure 18-3. If the same Ranking is applied to this report, then only the rows containing T-Shirts and Jewelry for all the break levels would be displayed.

In the Select Top/Bottom dialog box, you can choose to display subtotals and display percentages. When you display percentages, BusinessObjects inserts a new column in the block report to calculate the percentages for each row of data. In the preceding ranking reports, the % Sales and % Qty columns were created by applying a Calculation to the columns. The last Percentage column in each ranked-block was inserted by selecting the Display percentages option from the Select Top/Bottom dialog box. Notice that it corresponds to the percent values from the full data set on the left. In this way, you can say that the top two products account for 48 percent of Sales Revenue while the rest account for 52 percent of the Sales Revenue. The following calculations get inserted into the column or break footer:

  • Column:

    =Sum(<Sales revenue>)/NoFilter(Sum(<Sales revenue>) ForAll <Category>)

  • Break Footer:

    =Sum(<Sales revenue>) =(NoFilter(Sum(<Sales revenue>))-Sum(<Sales revenue>)) =NoFilter(Sum(<Sales revenue>))

The first subtotal in the break footer reflects the sum of the values for only the rows of data displayed. The second subtotal calculates the subtotal for the values not displayed— that is, the clothing categories that do not account for ten percent of the number of categories. The third subtotal gives the grand total of $14,277,324, as shown earlier.



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Business Objects(c) The Complete Reference
Cisco Field Manual: Catalyst Switch Configuration
ISBN: 72262656
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 206

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