I was presented a business problem today. Seemed simple enough, however the users didn't know how they wanted to present the data. Whether it was by customer, region, order type, product, quarter, and there were four multiple measures available to analyze. I tried to program all of these options into a BASE SAS program with %macros but stopped & said "I HAVE OLAP now!!!"

So after building the 'Rubic' Cube of this data, enabling into the Web OLAP Viewer (via SAS Information Map Studio). I began slicing & dicing. But I wasn't the customer - SOOO I went straight to their office & started asking the real question:

'What is the business question you are trying to answer?'

Slicing & dicing the data AD-HOC provided the enormous value of OLAP Cubes and the Drill-Through to Detail feature gave the user more detail to address the problem right then & there. I was then removed from the analysis equation - fine by me, I have to grant the same success to 100 more users tomorrow :)