Whether your company employs five or 500 staff, to succeed in business, every organisation has to cope with numerous challenges including rapid changes in technology, fluctuating customer behaviour and shrinking product lifecycles. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses must make well-informed, timely decisions and be in a position to interpret and manage company-wide information with complete confidence.
Many companies have data sitting on various systems be it on Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems but aren't in a position to use, view or analyse the information cohesively. This is where a Business Intelligence solution is required.
The term Business Intelligence (BI) was coined in the late 1990's and referred to the emerging trend for empowering the business user with the ability to extract and view information from within their organisation in order to make informed business decisions. BI combines knowledge and data from various sources and presents it in report format or through what is known as the ‘dashboard'. Using the analogy of a car dashboard where all the performance indicators are located in one place and easily viewed this can be applied to a business dashboard which enables the user to see the companies Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) instantly. These are fully inter - active and a BI solution such as EJBI allows you to determine your own access permissions be it at CEO, director, or senior manager level or below. It also presents the information in high impact, colourful, professional visual displays be it in the form of pie charts, line charts and bar charts, as well as creating reports, forecasts and schedules.
BI query tools and software applications are now widely used by organisations to understand trends in order to adjust business strategy in order to make effective business decisions. Information regarding customers, product sales, operational costs, Human Resources, staffing and training expenditure and demographic data can be extracted from other systems to give a unified view of the company's performance.
The BI tools and applications in use today offer simple reporting and query tools known as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) functionality. This enables a company to trend, monitor and forecast data to satisfy operational and management information requirements. As data is gathered over time these tools can be used by the business to develop valuable baseline information, establish KPI's and monitor results and make strategic course corrections.
The power of BI tools allows business users to extract data and transform the data into a central data store known as a cube. The cube has a ‘drill down' feature' which allows the user to query information and view finer detail to determine the actions required to meet their specific business needs. EJBI allows you to colour code these features so best sellers or under performers are easily identified.
You don't have to be an IT expert to use a facility such as EJBI as it is very easy to use and it delivered straight to your web browser. This also makes accessing the system extremely simple and convenient as this can be done from virtually anywhere provided you have access to the web, particularly helpful if your management team are not all based at the same site or location.
A BI system such as EJBI will soon give rapid return on investment as monitoring your company performance becomes second nature and becomes an invaluable facility for identifying trends and issues at anearly stage saving you time and money.
For further information on how EJBI can help your business stay ahead of the competition please contact marija@elegantmicroweb.co.uk [1] or telephone 01733 746478.