GCPS is web-based and you can sign in or sign up here.

Once signed in, you can open your workspace here.

In your workspace, you will first see your dashboard which summarizes your activities, such as, your current projects and your interactions with other users, for example, likes, cites or copies, comments. If you want to create some analysis, please click on GCPS.

In GCPS, you can create a new project and search for existing projects by title. You can edit the title and abstract of a project. You can also edit the content of a project, slide-show / view the project, and delete the project. Finally, you can invite other users to collaborate on a project, copy a project, merge multiple projects into one, download a project into PDF file, and notify your followers of this project.

To create a new project, please enter a project title and abstract here. 

When you edit a project, you can add a new page, save the project, preview the project, and sort and delete pages in batch. On each page, you can add the title of the page here, and enter your notes / insights etc. here. Once you are done, you can view or slide show the project here and exit editing here.

You can create a new page by clicking on “New Page”. On this new page, you can choose from the following options: template page, analysis tools, navigator, supply chain mapping and upload image. Let me explain each option one-by-one.

Clicking on Analysis Tools button brings up a drop-down menu where you can select a variety of analysis tools, such as business geoinfo, which projects company data to maps; industry analysis, to analyze and compare industries; and enterprise diagnosis, to compare and benchmark companies. Let’s first create an analysis for business geoinfo, which includes enterprise distribution and region comparison among others.

Let’s first open enterprise distribution. On the left panel, you can select analysis module, industry, country or region, org form and year. Analysis module: (1) “Enterprise Distribution” includes a broad range of KPIs frequently used, (2) choose your own: you can customize KPIs (5 categories) to show on the map. When you select industry, pay attention to the levels: the higher the level #, the more granular the industry classification is, for instance, industrials – transportation - airlines. After selecting the level, you can search for industries. Next you can select region / country: ~100, search. Year. Then, click on start analysis, a map is now generated. On the right panel, you can select various KPIs to show on the map. On the top of the right panel, you can select graph type, show or hide label, open or close right panel, and download picture. Finally, you can save your analysis here.

Let’s then open region comparison, for instance, to compare two states of the US: New York and California. Left panel: indicator (5 categories of choosing your own), region (country, state, city). Right panel: how to group companies, which groups to show, show companies or just the industry. Picture: negative value is represented by shaded circles.

New for scatter plots: annotation, remove / restore dots, highlight dots.
Annotation: you can add or remove comments / notes on the graph. 
Dot removal (outliers may skew a graph, so you may want to remove them to get a better understanding of the data). 
You can search and highlight companies on the graph. This is useful because sometimes there are too many companies and you cannot find the one that you are interested.
You can choose to focus only on SP500 companies

Left panel: Analysis module on different KPI combinations, pre-mixed / frequently used vs. choose your own / customized (total or median), Year range can be changed.
Right panel: Merge or separate graphs, line vs. Bar charts, CAGR bar-charts. CAGR = compound annual growth rate.

Left panel: analysis module on different breakdowns, such as revenue breakdown, assets breakdown, liabilities breakdown ...
Right panel: vertical or horizontal bars, show or hide elements.

Left panel: choose at least two industries to compare.
Right panel: switch between bar-charts and spider web

Left panel: analysis modules on different metrics, such as total revenue – market share analysis, split of profit, four-firm concentration ratio. 
Right panel: show or hide companies.

show how the KPI is distributed for a chosen industry, region and year. Histogram of the KPI.
Right panel: choose KPI. 
Use mouse to zoom in or out, to see more details.

Auto fill can quickly get you the companies you want. If you know the industry classification of the companies that you are interested in, just select the industry and then in the company filter, select the companies. But if you do not know, you can use auto-fill to search companies by ticker symbol or name etc., which automatically fills other parameters, such as industry, country, on the left panel. For example, if I want to compare Apple, Google and MSFT, …

Ranking enterprises by a KPI of your choice. New features: order (up / ascend or down / descend). Page size: how many companies to show each page. You can also select the value range to narrow down the ranking of enterprises to those with values in a specific range.

Select a company and compare it to a population to see where it stands in terms of percentile rank. It also displays the abnormality indicators such as normal, high or low.
Analysis module: standard examination, specialized examinations or customized examination.

Value driver analysis helps to find causal relationship between two variables or KPIs for specific companies or all companies in an industry.
Left panel: select variables for X and Y by searching or browsing. Select industry. Company selection is optional: if selected, only plot them. Otherwise, plot all companies in the selected industry.
Right panel: same as other scatter plots.

Map out a company’s upstream and downstream industries in the supply chain to identify its potential suppliers and customers. … We can illustrate supply chain mapping by Apple. Apple is classified as technology hardware. You can see its up or down stream industries. You can fine tune the analysis by region, year and KPI.

Open node (industry) details you can see all companies in this industry. Click on the regions to remove or add back regions. You can also download the pictures, and save the result.

It will be much easier for people to understand and appreciate your work if you can include some template pages into your project to summarize your findings and insights. There are four types of template page to choose from, such as the title page, the content page and the split page, and blank page.

A user can invite other users to work on one project as collaborators, or cancel the collaboration if deem necessary

The invited collaborator can choose to accept or deny the invitation. Even if you accept the invitation, you can withdraw later by open collaboration on that project and delete yourself.

When multiple authors are working on a collaborative project. If one author is working on a page, other authors cannot work on the same page simultaneously. Edits are instantly made for all authors.

Enormous BI / insights have been generated on the site by people from all over the world, you are free to search and discover your favorite projects and insights in the project gallery.