Does Your Company Need BI?

Absolutely! Your company does need BI.

Today,in this competitive business environment, company needs making right decisions in timely manner. It can be achieved if you have Business Intelligence application to compile the database through OLAP and present it in reporting analysis to support decision makers at all levels of an organizations in making decision.
Below is typical way an organization might use business intelligence :
Business Intelligence connects the right people to the right information at the right time. For example, when reviewing the current financial scorecard, your sales manager, Rachel, notices that one particular region is not contributing as much as other regions. When analyzing the data from the spreadsheet for the low-performing region, she notices that one particular salesperson, John, has below-average sales numbers.

At the same time, John receives through e-mail a weekly status report that contains qualified leads in the region, pipeline information, and details about deals closed. Next, he opens the dashboard and searches on information about his top account, and he sees data from his enterprise resource planning (ERP) software related to that account. John notes that his average deal size is smaller than others in the region. It’s easy for John to find out why this is by doing some “what if” analysis. He inputs different variables to determine the number of leads he needs to reach the company sales average. Next, by doing further analysis on data for the region, John can compare his sales numbers with regional averages. He adds more information that shows the discount rate, and then adds visualization to better understand the results. The visual representation of the data shows John that his discount rate is much lower than the average for the region.

Next, it’s time to tell his manager. John publishes this information to the server, schedules a meeting with Rachel to discuss getting approval to increase the discount rate so that he’ll be better able to compete, and alerts Rachel through online collaboration that he’s just posted hisanalysis report.

John and Rachel meet to discuss details. Afterward, he makes a note on the key performance indicator (KPI) that he owns for that region, and Rachel sees the annotation in her latest scorecard as a reminder that there’s a new strategy in place to increase John’s results and address the poor sales performance.

As you see at the story above, with BI you will be able to identify quickly what the problem is and its root cause so that you can establish right strategy to address the problem.

Source : Microsoft, whatiserp