Decision-making has to be a well-informed process, and not a guessing game. The ability of a business to rapidly adapt to customers needs and desires has become an imperative in order to be able to compete and succeed.
In rapidly changing business environments, your decision-makers may simply not have access to consistent, consolidated and timely data. Your organisation needs to derive intelligence out of the data, rather then just ‘data'. Your decision-maker's needs are likely to be evolving constantly, and the IT systems serving your existing reporting systems may not be sufficiently flexible, scalable and intelligent to address the reporting needs of a developing business. This calls for intelligent applications and decision-support systems that allow the users to easily access and leverage information for informed decision making.
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of gathering meaningful information in the field of commerce; it can be described as the process of enhancing data into information, and information into knowledge. Business intelligence is a vital discipline if a business is to gain a sustainable competitive advantage, and in some industries BI is an essential core competence.
Businesses are increasingly coming to realise that in the competitive, fast
paced, ever-changing commercial environment, gaining a competitive advantage is
entirely dependent on how quickly they can respond and adapt to change
An effective deployment of the discipline enables organisations and their personnel accomplish their goals more quickly, by instantly providing the information they need. An effective system allows a decision to be made based on facts, not merely intuition. One study into the deployment of professional BI solutions has shown that the average return on investment is in excess of 400%.
In short, BI enables organisations to make well-informed business decisions, equipping them to understand the potential benefits and impacts involved, and it can be an effective driving force for competitive advantage.
Imagine the benefits of having the ability to dynamically report across disparate business criteria (known as ‘dimensions' in BI systems) and navigate through a sea of business data, to gain understanding of business trends and patterns, and the reasons behind them. When implemented well - and used proactively - small businesses equipped with BI tools can make decisions that capture market niches and tap into new revenue streams, directly profiting the organisation. Businesses that don't have quality sources of information and dynamic reporting tools are often left trailing in the wake of businesses equipped with an effective BI toolset.
Ultimately, the objective of business intelligence is to improve the timeliness and quality of information. Information of high integrity can be a bit like having a crystal ball, giving you an indication of the best course to take.
Some of the many business reporting interests where a Business Intelligence discipline can provide insight are:
Customer analytics: including customer profiling, targeted marketing, personalisation, collaborative filtering, satisfaction, lifetime value.
Personnel productivity: including HR utilisation and optimisation, production effectiveness.
Sales channel analytics: marketing effectiveness, sales performance.
Behaviour analysis: Purchasing trends, web activity, fraud and abuse detection, customer attrition, social network analysis.
Business productivity analytics: Defect analysis, capacity planning and optimisation, financial reporting, risk management, just-in-time reporting, asset management and resource planning.
Supply chain analytics: Supplier and vendor management, shipping, inventory control, distribution analysis.
An effective BI system can provide a window into the health of a business. Many tools provide an ‘Intelligence Dashboard' which show critical success factors. For example, the dashboard may display metrics for regional sales, supply chains, customer satisfaction, factory productivity and customer profitability.
Businesses are increasingly coming to realise that in the competitive, fast paced, ever-changing commercial environment, gaining a competitive advantage is entirely dependent on how quickly they can respond and adapt to change. Business intelligence enables them to use information proactively to respond to changes.
BI systems have the following elements:
Data warehousing: involves bringing both enterprise and external data together in a format suitable for BI tools
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) tools allow business executives to look at data from completely different points of view. They will allow the user to drill deeply into data, and create hypothetical scenarios to discover and validate business trends. The instant response and on-demand reporting capabilities remove limitations of the traditional reporting systems
Data mining tools are used to discover data patterns. They are normally suitable only when an extremely large amount of data is present.
True, not all the above applications are suitable for SME companies. Nevertheless, OLAP reporting technology can be, and has been, very successfully deployed and a rapid return on investment made by SMEs, in particular where it has been geared toward their specific business applications and reporting requirements.
The operability of OLAP tools is very similar to that of a spreadsheet, so SME business executives find it easy to learn and exploit the power of this technology.
Business Intelligence for the small to medium enterprise is coming of age.
For more information see www.cometstream.com
