foreUP Business Intelligence - The Pulse Tab

Prerequisites

foreUP Business Intelligence enabled

Overview

The Pulse tab in foreUP Business Analytics is a centralized location where you can stay on top of your most important KPIs across multiple dashboards, and set pulse alerts on these KPIs. By adding important KPIs from your dashboards to Pulse, you can get a comprehensive picture of your data from a single location.

For example, you can pick one or two KPIs from your Operator Dashboard, and have them display next to another KPI you’ve selected from your Customer Dashboard. Additionally, you can configure alerts on these data points, which can let you know when values in that measure move above or below a threshold value. If you don’t want to define a specific threshold value, you can configure the alerts to notify you when the measure has a large spike or dip, using AI to look for patterns and anomalies.

Accessing the Tool

1. Sign in to the foreupsoftware.com portal as usual for daily operations.
2. Click on the navigational menu at the top-left of the page, and from the menu of options that drops down, select the “Business Intelligence” option.
3. Select the Pulse tab.

Using the Pulse Tab

By hovering your mouse over the header of any tile in Pulse, you can view additional options for that tile:

1. Open Dashboard: Opens a new tab in your browser with the dashboard from which the data point originated, so you can view the data in its original context.
2. Info: Provides details on when the notification is sent to you (if at all). Also displays the date/time that the data point was added to Pulse, and the date/time of the last edit.
3. Menu: Allows you to edit, duplicate, turn on/off, and delete the item from Pulse.
   
4. View Mode:
   1. Latest (selected by default): Shows the most current value for the measure displayed for this Pulse tile.
   2. History: Displays a history of values for this measure over time. Note that this only displays history since the measure was added to Pulse.
      

Adding New Tiles to Pulse

Adding new tiles to your Pulse tab is actually done from your dashboards, not from the Pulse tab itself. To begin the process, navigate to a dashboard, and identify a measure that you’d like to add to Pulse. Depending on the type of data, there are two main methods for adding a data point to Pulse:

1. For simpler report types, clicking on the three-dot menu at the top right of a widget will typically reveal an option to ‘Add to Pulse’. Clicking this option will bring up the ‘Add to Pulse’ menu (detailed below)
   
2. For reports that have multiple dimensions, such as most bar, column, and line charts, you will need to select a specific data point from the graph to add to Pulse, instead of adding the full report. To do this, click on a data point in the chart (such as a column, or slice of a pie chart) and then select the ‘Add to Pulse’ option from the contextual menu that appears. This will bring up the same ‘Add to Pulse’ menu.
   

On the ‘Add to Pulse’ menu there are a few options to configure before you can add the measure to Pulse:

1. Name: Give this Pulse card a title. This pre-fills with the name of the data point from the report, but you can adjust it as needed.
2. Alert Condition: Select when you would like to be notified (via a notification within foreUP Business Intelligence) about this measure:
   1. Threshold: Selecting this option will allow you to define a specific threshold value, and whether you want to be alerted when the value goes above or below the value. This is ideal if you have a specific target in mind, and want to be notified when your business meets that target.
   2. Automatic: Selecting this option will enable the system to automatically alert you when values in this data point rise or fall more than they usually do. Using AI algorithms, this option is ideal for monitoring values that might not have set targets, but which you want to keep an eye on.
   3. Always (not recommended): This will alert you to the value of this dimension each time the data model refreshes, regardless of the value. This option is typically not recommended as it can become noisy, notifying you roughly every hour.
      
3. The Advanced button allows you to configure the filter settings for the data point. By default, as well as if you don’t open up the advanced section at all, the filters that were active on your dashboard at the time that you added the data point to Pulse will be applied here as well.
4. Finally, click the Add button to finish the configuration, and add the item to your Pulse tab.