Depth of Analysis refers to how far a user can drill to analyze performance, ideally down to the line item transaction, as well as how many dimensions along which the user can simultaneously perform their analyses.
A profitability system that focuses solely on the customer, or solely on the product, is deficient. An individual customer or product reported by the system as unprofitable in the aggregate could in fact be profitable save for a few highly unprofitable interactions. The transaction, and not the customer or product, is the basic unit of operational interaction and therefore should be the atomic unit of measurement.
Further, there are often additional pieces of data available at the transaction-level, even beyond the customer and product, which can make for enlightening inquiry, and retaining transaction level detail even enables affinity or basket analysis, so as to reveal the profitability of frequently purchased bundles of products. It is simply not enough to know whether a given customer or product, or customer-product combination is profitable, when there are other dimensions that may be relevant, and profitable or unprofitable affinities that may lift or erode the value of a given offering. It is only at the transaction-level that the data is fully florid and ripe for analysis.
How Depth of Analysis relates to the other sectors of comparison
Depth of Analysis is critical to be able to verify the accuracy of the system, and thereby to attain broad organizational buy-in. The need to perform deep analysis requires very sophisticated data integration staged in a highly scalable solution.
