Nextanalytics allows different perspectives of historical analysis.  Following are three short examples:

1. top selling product groups and when rankings changed,
2. fastest growing product groups,
3. product groups with the largest net change. 

Three distinct analytic objectives, one simple query, executed once.

The results of the query is the first 'page'. 

VALUE (in this example) is the total sales. 

SALEWEEK is the week of the year. 

GROUP_NAME is the item that you want to analyze.

Nextanalytics makes it easy to divide all values by 1000 and change the labels, to improve readability.

Then, with just three clicks, column SALEWEEK is made into a crosstab.

This becomes the starting point for analysis.

Since we are most interested in the top 10 in the most recent time period, we sort that column. 

Next we want to change the values to be their rank values, down each column.

The changes in rank status are not visibly obvious, so we are going to use Nextanalytics to alert us to the changes.  We're going to show the first crosstab color-coded, with the colors being chosen by the page with the ranks in them. 

The result of using Alerts shows below. Now it becomes obvious when rank positions changed, and what the values were at the time of the change.

That was one technique for looking at the top products and for seeing when their ranking change. Now we'll move on to phase 2 of the example.

Next step in the example, show the "fastest growing"...

Let's return to the crosstab we created.

It is a one click operation to calculate week-to-week growth.

We perform the same steps as before except that now we are working with growth numbers.

The end result is that we see more variation. The sort shows us the FASTEST GROWING rows.

That was a technique for looking at growth.  Now we'll move on to phase 3 of the example.

Changes in Net change 

Studying Net Change can be useful to see the magnitude of the values, because large numbers can have an effect on the business in ways that are hidden by looking at percentages or ranks (from the previous phases).

Returning again to the first crosstab, we calculate the net change using a single menu operation.

From there, we perform all the same steps. When the crosstab is sorted, the rows which had the largest net change are at the top.

By using Alerts, we can see which rows have a tendency to have large net changes.

Summary

Three different perspectives were obtained from a single, simple SQL query.

We used Nextanalytics ranking and alerting functions, with the easy abililty to compute growth and net change.  Important trends and patterns were readily visible whereas they were not on a basic crosstab.

This was only a sample.  There many other ways that Nextanalytics allows you to measure these three key metrics.