System Terms and Definitions

The following terms and definitions describe the key concepts in the Front End Insights (FEI) portal.

Data Provider or Consumer (DPC) -  The data provider or consumer is the person(s) or institution(s) that provide the transactional and/or reference data, and/or consumes the data by accessing reports.

 Entity - Entities are tangible elements (or items) within the reference data and are defined by the data provider. Examples of entities are: products, stores or regions. Reports are run on one or more entities.

 Entity Class - An entity class refers to similar entities that are grouped together. For instance, the entity class ‘Region’ refers to all entities that are classified as regions.

 Filter - A filter is applied to a report to reduce the data that is reported on. For instance, if a filter on a specific region is applied then only data for that region will be displayed in the report.

 Measure - Measures refer to the quantities found in the transactional data and are defined by the data provider. Examples of measures are: sales volume, sales price, scan units, average unit price, quantity on hand and quantity on order.

 Period - A period refers to a time frame. It has a start date and an end date. The period units (e.g. year, quarter, month, and week) and their relation to calendar dates are defined by the data provider or data consumer.

 Picker Tools - These tools are used to configure a report before running the report. There are different types of picker tools that allow you to select the report period, measures, entities, and/or filters.

 Reference Data - The reference data provides information pertaining to the transactional data. For instance, the transactional data may contain the product code. The interpretation of the product code (product name, Universal Product Code and so forth) is known as the product’s reference data.

 Transactional Data - The transactional data contains information regarding the details of a business transaction. This includes information such as the product code, the store code, the quantity, the unit price, the sales price, and so on. This means that the transactional data contains references to entities (e.g. a product) in the reference data, as well as the values for the measures (e.g. sales volume) associated with those entities.

 Universe - A universe is a collection of the transactional data pertaining to a data provider or a group of data providers.  FEI has four unique universes.