BI Component improvements

[Pierre Smits <pi...@apache.org>]

Hi All,

The BI component has, since its incorporation in the code base in 2007 by
Jacopo, not received the love from the community that such an important
feature set deserved. Initially the plugin was depicted as a Proof of
Concept about how OFBIz could deliver on populating a data warehouse for
business intelligence and analysis.

Business Inteligence and Analysis is an key domain for the success of any
organisation, but is often an costly endeavour to implement. Small and
Medium Enterprises often don't have the funds to implement a Business
Intelligence and Analysis solution other than through Spreadsheets and such.
The unique proposition of OFBIZ (visavis its entity and service engines)
and the BI component offers an unique feature set to feed the basic
elements (dimension and fact tables) in the data warehouse for Business
Intelligence and Analysis.

As such, I have started to improve the BI component to get to a state
beyond that of being a Proof of concept. Based on the DataWarehouse Toolkit
book by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross I have opened a master ticket (see
[1]) and an associated wiki page (see [2]) to capture improvements and
documentation to the BI Component. Implemented improvements have been
submitted to the plugins repository in the form of a Pull Request. This
pull request (see [3]) now includes:

   - improvements for the SalesOrderItemStarSchema, including
   additions/improvements of various dimension entities and to the associated
   SalesOrderItemFact entity;
   - improvements for the SalesInvoiceItemStarSchema, including
   additions/improvements of various dimension entities and the associated
   SalesInvoiceItemFact entity;
   - improvements for the InventoryItemStarSchema, including
   additions/improvements of various dimension entities and the associated
   InventoryItemFact entity;
   - improvments regarding the main page of the component;
   - improvements to the initialisation of the underlying data warehouse
   (the entity engine for org.apache.ofbiz.olap)
   - improvements to the report builder in the component

Beyond the enhancements regarding the Business Intelligence and Analysis
related to the existing functionalities in the Sales and Warehousing
domains as mentioned above, I have started to work on extending the
functionalities for business intelligence regarding domains:

   - manufacturing - e.g. asset utilisation
   - projects - team member efficiency

Understandably, the BI component is not offering a complete feature set
yet. But, with current improvements it makes a giant leap forward in the
OFBiz proposition as with the improvements integrated it is the only
OpenSource E-commerce, Manufacturing Management, Project Management and/or
Warehousing solution with BI functionalities.

I invite all community members to review submitted changes and if you have
any suggestions etc. to share these, either via this thread or via comments
in the tickets under [1]. Looking forward to your feedback and
collaboration to improve this plugin.

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-11414
[2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Business+Intelligence
[3] https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-plugins/pull/11


Met vriendelijke groet,

Pierre Smits
*Proud* *contributor** of* Apache OFBiz <https://ofbiz.apache.org/> since
2008 (without privileges)

*Apache Trafodion <https://trafodion.apache.org>, Vice President*
*Apache Directory <https://directory.apache.org>, PMC Member*
Apache Incubator <https://incubator.apache.org>, committer
Apache Steve <https://steve.apache.org>, committer