Business Intelligence Overview

Decisions, Decisions…

Just how well do you know your own business ? ?

Business moves at such a pace these days that ‘just keeping up’ can sometimes cause you to take your eye off the ball.

• How profitable were we last month?
• Did we deliver everything on time, every time?
• Which of our customers are paying us on time? More importantly who are the ones that aren’t – and what will the impact be and when?

Business Intelligence helps companies to improve profits, increase efficiency and reduce costs by exploiting the data that they already have by making it easier for them to understand.

To do this however, we have to overcome four challenges…

1 Information needs to be timely, relevant, accurate and available to users across all time zones

Each business needs to review trends quickly and frequently to ensure an efficient and profitable operation. Delays in receiving information on downward trends can mean that managers receiving information late are taking actions on a reactive rather than a proactive basis. Lost revenues; reductions in margin; increased costs or poor customer service are likely to result.

Organisations operating globally need to provide users and potentially suppliers and customers with key performance information in an efficient and timely manner, whilst being administered centrally.

Lack of a suitable vehicle for site level financial reporting

Limited financial reporting may be provided via data extracts taken from the organisations financial application. Additional summary reporting could be achieved via a Microsoft Excel or Lotus 123 spreadsheet for Financial Highlights, Profit and Loss, Operating Profit Variance, Headcount, Operating Cashflow and Trading Forecasts. However, the impact on the business is time consuming and can result in varying versions of the truth, thereby creating ‘islands of information’.

2 Introduction of Automation to Information Flow to reduce cost and effort

Whilst many organisations have large volumes of operational data, there may be very limited usable Management Information. Operational reports can be very detailed and hundreds of pages thick. This can be hard to analyse and could consume much of the manager’s time. Information in this format would be tabular, static, two dimensional, not visual, multi-dimensional, dynamic or interactive. To base a decision on data captured from hard copy reports often involves re-keying of the data into spreadsheets or transposing onto hand written summary forms. This is a costly and error prone process so many decisions were based on managers past experience alone.

3 Duplicated data has to be cleaned and repaired manually before a report can be produced

Any organisation with multiple operational applications will potentially duplicate base data on the same set of entities such as employee, price, product, supplier, and client. Is this data accurate, and are the descriptions accurate?

Vast amounts of data entered into operational systems through multiple sources can result in issues such as inconsistencies in the way data is entered, e.g. the use of capital letters and the way initials are presented. This can lead to reductions in the amount of data actually used when trends and statistics analyses are undertaken, thereby giving an incorrect view of the business situation.

How can we best control and integrate these disparate sources?

4 One version of the truth in a standard format

Organisations consisting of multiple business units where each has a different reporting system can lead to several versions of the truth presented in differing ways. This results in more time being spent at meetings discussing which version is correct rather than making actual business decisions.

One version of the truth also eradicates inconsistent reporting formats across an organisation.