The quick answer to this is that EDA works as advertised - if you’ve set your data up perfectly to match the models and visualizations that work best in EDA. Go to Phocas Software’s website and check them out. Also, get a login for the support site - or it’s the User group - I forget. There is more stuff to learn/see out there and the documentation for the product is pretty good. Just remember some of it is not for Epicor users because of the licensing/setup/etc. of the relationship.
As for specific questions you asked -
- The financial reporting piece is almost ready. I’m waiting on the installation to our ‘site’ presently.
- Budgeting and forecasting - not like a proper software package that handles what-if scenarios (allowing for value changes and write back to the Database kind of stuff) but you bring in the budget as a separate data source and add it to the model for the comparison models - works fine.
- Sales/Materials/Production - easy enough. just get the data the way your company likes it and tweak the model a little.
- Dataset - really, it’s a stack of SQL queries that runs on a schedule within a nice little app. The queries have a little bit of special syntax, but we’ve modified a lot of them to our taste very easily. As for Other data or fields - Yes and Yes. Pretty much any OLE/ODBC compliant data source is fair game, as well as spreadsheets, delimited files and the like.
- External Data - see previous answer.
- Skill levels - SQL/DB type skills are required to work the datasets and construct/alter the data models. Any user with Excel Pivot table, Qlickview, or other tool experience will have an easier time on the visualizations, but most users take to it pretty well. You can build and save favorites - so most users will rely on IT to build things for/with them and add them to their favorites.
- Performance - we’re not at ‘millions’ but it’s an engine that churns your data into the ‘cubes’, so that takes some time. But loading the data into the visualizations is super quick for our amount of data. I don’t expect google-level performance but we’re fully pleased with it.