Announcing an Ask Me Anything with the Arithmix Product Team, to be held right here on January 25th, 11 AM Eastern.
Ask us whatever you want: anything about the Arithmix platform, the future of planning and analytics, etc.
In addition to answering your open questions, we’ll be leading a brief chat on the benefits of using dimensions and measures for efficient and effective planning and analytics – especially if your organization is using spreadsheets for those tasks.
How to participate?
Reply to this topic with your questions, and then join us here on Jan 25th, where we’ll be responding to them live --as well as any follow up questions you may have!
Feel free to begin commenting below with your questions. Not yet an Arithmix user and want to participate? Create your free account today!
And be sure to RSVP to the event at the top of this post so you won’t miss it!
Excited to chat with you all, here, Wednesday!
Feel free to submit questions by replying to this topic–that’s the best way to do it. Or, if you’d prefer to submit questions anonymously, you can submit them via this form!
Hey James! Welcome!
The chat is going to be held here: with participants commenting their questions and our team responding to the comments live in a responding comment. If you can’t make it during the hour, you can always comment your questions ahead of time or fill out our anonymous question form.
Hi all, I have a background in data science/engineering so I’m more comfortable thinking in terms of relational joins and lambda functions than I am in static spreadsheet formulas. Is there potential for dimension-and-measure based platforms to bridge some gaps between users comfortable with relational databases/scripting and users who prefer spreadsheets, both in terms of direct platform integration and mutual understanding?
We’re excited to chat with you all today. We’ve got Adam Cherbetji, our Head of Product, Vincent Lister, our Product Manager, Jen Drewett, our Product Specialist, and Robin Richards, our Head of Design, with us today.
Feel free to comment below with your questions, or you’re welcome to submit questions anonymously via our form. We’ll be checking that form throughout and posting the questions here. Feel free to ask follow up questions as well!
To start things off, we have a few questions about using measures and dimensions vs rows and columns in a spreadsheet, which I’ll drop in the comments.
Hi all - I’ve been tracking Arithmix and excited to see the launch. This space is getting pretty crowded, so I’m curious what you feel will set Arithmix apart from other new players joining the space?
Q. Can you give a real-world scenario where it’s clear why measures and dimensions are more beneficial?
I thought this was a really interesting question. I think a good example of this is if you are thinking about products in a supermarket. In a spreadsheet software you would import a list of your transactional software and then you would have to write lots of if statements if you wanted to get a list of for example the total spent on ‘Drinks’ or 'Food.
You might also need to write lots of look-up statements to get the list of products. Dimensions and measures avoid this problem.
We can create a dimension once which might be product type [e.g., Food,Drinks, Home] and then we can use that again and again without writing all these functions. Instead Arithmix knows the relationship between the data and you can auto-sum them.
Yes I certainly believe so. Measures and dimensions in arithmix allow you to express your calculations in much more natural way than spreadsheets, and they hide a lot of the complexities of joins and lookups. We’ve built some proof of concept platform integrations including SQL in the past, definitely something we want to come back to in the not too distant future.
A second related question, when I’ve worked with measures and dimensions in the past (mainly in Tableau), I usually end up doing most of the preprocessing heavy lifting with other tools (SQL/scripting) meaning most of the business logic is defined outside the BI platform, because certain types of transformations are difficult to define within the final platform. I don’t think this is the intended usecase for any BI tools but I think others end up defaulting to a similar approach? Is it a reasonable goal to expect tools like Arithmix to allow users to start with messy/raw data, regardless of structure, and build it into a usable format all in one place?
Here at Arithmix we are aiming to offer the functionality and flexibility of enterprise level dimensional modelling tools. We will make this functionality accessible to everyone without the need for complicated training courses. Our ambition is that users will be able to manage and extend their own models without the need for consultants.
Hi James, great to hear from you! There are several things that set Arithmix apart, such as:
Ease of use - look and feel of a spreadsheet, but combined with the data structure of a database. Centralized access to that structure for shared use around the organization.
For Everyone - most folks in the space are focused on Finance/FP&A. We believe that analytics and planning happen everywhere within an organization. Arithmix is available to all teams, any function, any size of organization.
Dimensionality - as this discussion highlights, Arithmix is built with dimensionality at it’s core. Most others really don’t understand the need and power of dimensions. And we aim to make this power accessible to anyone that is familiar with concepts like a pivot table in a spreadsheet.
Self-service - Arithmix is and will continue to be free to use for small teams and data sets. We believe anyone should be able to enjoy the benefits of an excellent analytics and planning platform. As users scale, we offer paid tiers that allow for more users, more data, and more connectivity between apps built on the platform.
Hopefully that gives you a sense of some of our focus and differentiation.
Is it a reasonable goal to expect tools like Arithmix to allow users to start with messy/raw data, regardless of structure, and build it into a usable format all in one place?
Great question! We are certainly aiming towards being able to deal with raw data but we also recognise that sometimes some transformations, deletions or modifications are easier in the original system. That’s why in our roadmap we are going to address connectivity to other systems such as Salesforce or data force to allow you to automate getting data into Arithmix as easily as possible.
