The Board Toolkit includes a high performance multidimensional database (M-OLAP), capable of handling extremely large amounts of data without suffering from the typical limitations of traditional M-OLAP engines, and a powerful yet simple front end development environment for building applications that range from simple reporting to complex planning and simulation.

The Unique CPM and BI Toolkit

Although the CPM Toolkit market segment has only recently seen official recognition, BOARD International is the first software vendor to adopt the toolkit approach, successfully bringing BOARD MIT Management Intelligence Toolkit to a large variety of organizations over the last 10 years.

All this experience has been harnessed to make BOARD's components both easy to use and extremely rich in functionalities.

At its core, the BOARD toolkit is a seamless blend of tools in one environment providing tremendous efficiencies during the design, development and deployment of CPM solutions. These tools - a highly scalable multidimensional database, data reading and transformation tools (ETL), application user interface environment (client and web), security and a multi-tier architecture for system delivery are the pieces one might expect when building an analysis application. The BOARD toolkit was designed to use all these tools together within the same development framework to provide an unparalleled combination of speed, flexibility and affordability.

This integrated all-in-one approach eliminates the need for high levels of technical expertise and substantially reduces the complexity and costs associated with building, customizing and maintaining a data analysis environment. Most of these efficiencies arise by eliminating the technical "plumbing" involved in combining the various software layers.

The Toolkit and the needs of end-users: a new perspective

Users build BOARD applications using a wide variety of objects including reports, charts, worksheets, calculation models, pictures, gauges and multi-file viewing objects. To build applications, users simply drag and drop these objects from a toolbox onto the screen without any programming. Through this application environment, users gain access to a wide range of functions for maximum flexibility of analysis including time series analysis, exception reporting, sorting, ranking, filtering, color-coding, 80-20 analysis and multidimensional modelling.

Seamless integration with the database makes the objects that comprise the application data-aware. This means you can easily synchronize the advanced visualization and data exploration. Instead of simply drilling-down on a report to retrieve a lower level display of the same report, users can click directly on a report line and immediately see other related objects (charts, gauges, etc.) updated on the screen. In effect, this produces intuitive, immediate, on-screen drill-anywhere capabilities. It's even possible to launch a simulation / calculation model from a report line and apply the logic (an allocation, a what-if, etc.) only to the subset of data related to that selection.