Business Objects

                 

Partner Business Objects -    IRIS

 Business Intelligence: Empowering your Organization

     White Paper

Your organization’s focus has been on acquiring customers, increasing revenues and profitability and outpacing the competition. And while your organization has continued to improve its operational efficiencies (sometimes by quickly learning from past mistakes), you feel your company should be spending more time analyzing what’s going on and planning for the future-rather than having its employees constantly run around trying to solve operational problems.

 

If you find it challenging to quickly, effectively, and economically get access to, analyze, report on, and share information you need to achieve corporate objectives, we suggest you strongly consider Business Intelligence (BI)

 

This white paper discusses why organizations need to respond quickly to changes in business conditions by delivering the right information, to all stakeholders at right time. This need for agility has spurred enterprises to invest in Business Analytics (which includes business intelligence (BI) tools, analytic applications, and the data warehousing platform).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

 

 

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..3

What is Business Intelligence?………………………………………………………3

Importance of Business Intelligence……………………………………………….3

An Effective BI Strategy…………………………………………………………………4

Signs Your Organization May Need Business Intelligence………………5

Benefits of BI………………………………………………………………………………..6

The Future of Business Intelligence……………………………………………….7

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………8

About Business Objects………………………………………………………………..9

 

Introduction

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting.

Companies use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. CIO’s use BI to identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for re-engineering.

With today’s BI tools, business folks can jump in and start analyzing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This democratization of information access helps users back up – with hard numbers – business decisions that would otherwise be based only on gut feelings and anecdotes.

Although Bi holds great promise, implementations can be dogged by technical and cultural challenges. Executives have to ensure that the data feeding BI applications is clean and consistent so that users trust it.

With the help of BI methods, the corporate data can be organized, analyzed in a better way and then converted into a useful knowledge of information needed to initiate a profitable business action. Thus it’s about turning a raw, collected data into intelligent information by analyzing and re-arranging the data according to the relationships between the data items by knowing what data to collect and manage and in what context.

Importance of Business Intelligence

A company’s collected raw data is an important asset where one can find solutions to many of an organization’s critical questions like ‘what was the net profit for a particular product last year and what will be sales this year and what are the key factors to be focused this year in order to increase the sales?’ So there arises a necessity of a well planned BI system that can lead to greater profitability by reducing the operating costs, increasing the sales and thereby improving the customer satisfaction for an enterprise.

With the help of a Business Intelligence system, a company may improve its business or rule over its competitors by exploring and exploiting its data to know the customer preferences, nature of customers, supply chains, geographical influences, pricings, and how to increase its overall business efficiency.

An Effective BI Strategy

From ensuring the smooth running of business processes to integrating data from various sources and generating sophisticated reports, business intelligence tools are proving their worth across the Indian industrial landscape be it in BFSI, telecom, retail, manufacturing or the government.

When planning for the growth of the organization, it is imperative for enterprises to embed a business intelligence strategy in the overall scheme of things. An effective BI solution not only ensures smooth functioning of various processes, but it also enables in making these cost-effective and in tune with the demands of the market. That said, any change or transformation in business requires that the organization’s CIO changes the information architecture and the applications that it supports. In fact, organizations are witnessing a drive to enhance reporting capabilities of existing systems. Top and middle managements want the ability to slice and dice data from various sources. Additionally, managements are looking at the ability to integrate data from different sources and automatically generate sophisticated reports that go beyond what can be done manually using a spreadsheet or a traditional reporting tool.

It has to be pervasive

However, the true value of BI can only be ascertained if it is put to pervasive use. Most organizations assume that BI is expensive and limit access to this technology by letting only the top executives or employees in selected business roles take advantage of it. On the contrary, in order to drive the optimal return from a BI investment, it is essential that every employee in an organization has access to the intelligence generated by the BI solution. In today’s context the most important functionality that customers are demanding is intelligent data that is filtered while looking at relevance for each level or role in the organization and helps them stay ahead of the competition.

BI tools aid companies in automating functions such as analysis, strategy and forecasting so that they are in a position to make better decisions. Reams have been written about ho BI helps companies gain complete and timely insights, distribute intelligence pervasively, and drive more effective actions and processes. So much so that it’s almost become a cliché. In India BI story is finally unfolding as organizations in industries such as retail, organized retail that is, are finding it to be an invaluable tool. CIO’s across verticals have listed BI as their top priority when it comes to technology.

Signs Your Organization May Need Business Intelligence

 

The following scenarios represent typical situations that could benefit from improves business intelligence (BI):

„     Multiple versions of the truth. Interdepartmental meetings frequently turn into shouting matches as participants argue about whose spreadsheet has the correct figures.

„     Inability to perform in-depth analysis. Your company knows which of its retail outlets have the greatest sales volume, but it doesn’t know which products have the highest sales.

„     Unable to locate important information. An employee in accounting mentioned that a report showing year-over-year growth for each customer has been posted to the company’s intranet. But you have no idea how to find it.

„     Lack of data privacy and security. One of your employees mentioned that a report showing quarterly bonuses was recently posted. While you know how to find this report, you are shocked to discover you can view everyone’s bonuses, not just your own – and those of the employees that report to you.

„     Business users shouldn’t have to become technical experts. One of your technical business users in the payroll department thinks he has mastered SQL. However, when he runs a query attempting to find all products with selling prices “less that $5 and greater than $1000”, he doesn’t understand why no products meet this criteria.

„     Need for simple-to-use production reporting technology. Your accounting department uses a word processor to generate customer invoices. Customers frequently complain about being invoiced twice for the same purchase or shipment.

„     Existing BI technology is too difficult to use. Your company’s sales manager used analysis tools at her former job that she insisted be used in your company as well. Although your company has invested in several licenses, users who have tried to use these tools have given up in frustration and rely exclusively on spreadsheets instead.

„     Historical values are not being retained. The sales department is conducting account reviews and wishes to compare each customer’s sales-to-date this year with its sales-to-date at this time last year. Sales maintains a spreadsheet for this year’s results, but the person who maintained the spreadsheet last year has left the company – and no one has any idea what happened to last years spreadsheet.

„     Weak or nonexistent BI technology limits your company’s operational flexibility. Your company has grown to the point where its customer base has expanded to the hundreds. While it values every customer, it would like to identify the top 10 in sales volume each month and offer them extra attention and special incentives.

„     Inability to comply with government reporting requirements. While your company is still relatively young, it hopes to one day go public. In your role as IT director, you want to take steps now to provide proper audit trails and data lineage to ensure that your CEO and CFO have confidence in the accuracy of your company’s financial numbers.

 

 

„     Lack of proper tools is negatively impacting IT productivity. As your company’s IT director, you are proud of your department’s ability to quickly respond to business user requests. However, you’ve started to hear complaints from your users that their report requests are not being resolved in a timely manner – and by the time they receive their reports, they no longer need them.

„     Inability to consolidate data from multiple sources for integrated information access. Reports that require data from multiple operational systems are especially difficult to generate and frequently involve generating separate reports from each system, and then combining the results in a spreadsheet.

 

The Benefits of BI

A major part of any manager’s job is to make decisions. If you can improve the overall quality of your organization’s decision-making process, you’ll improve the overall effectiveness of your organization. Business Intelligence will help your organization make better decisions. Because of this, BI was initially referred to as a decision-support system.

BI allows business users to analyze and better understand their organization’s plans and results. It provides insight into what’s working while identifying potential problem areas in time for users to take corrective action. It can be used to recognize opportunities as well as problems, and alert your organization to potential issues when exception conditions occur – such as sales dropping 20% below forecast or inventory falling below a threshold value.

Since BI product suits include a variety of components, organizations can pick those that are most appropriate for the task at hand and for the experience level of their individual employees. While in the past, only technical specialists typically used BI tools, most business people can now successfully use them as well. This has served to democratize the use of BI throughout organizations. The role of IT has positively evolved from one of digging out from its historic report request backlog to one of monitoring and administrating BI use, and setting the appropriate controls relative to who can access what data. BI technology has truly brought (analytic) power to the (business) people. The BI self-sufficiency has provided business users with faster response time and the ability to drill down and perform interactive analysis while enabling IT to more effectively and more efficiently serve it organizations.

While many managers and supervisors pride themselves on their intuition, BI provides tools to help verify their insights and even discover new ones. It permits business users to explore results at a high level and then drill down to analyze the underlying details. Business Intelligence is one of the primary keys to effective decision making.

The Future of Business Intelligence

Today, however, visionary vendors and BI professionals are conjuring new ways to blur the lines between analytical and operational applications. They trumpet the benefits of composite applications, process-driven BI, business-activity monitoring, BI services, operational dashboards, integrated business application suits, software as a service and open source BI, among other things. With new development techniques that make embedding analytics into business processes as easy as dragging and dropping objects onto a workbench, the future course of BI could change radically.

Rather than using standalone BI tools sets that require setup and training, business users will leverage embedded BI functionality that is an integral part of a larger application or package. Users will no longer shift software contexts when moving from operational processes to analytical ones. BI simply slips into the background of a primary application that users use to do their jobs. At this point, users may no longer realize that they are using distinct BI tools.

„     BI as a service. To switch on a lamp, you must first plug it into an outlet that taps into the electrical grid that powers the lamp. Like electricity, BI is destined to become an enterprise service that users and applications tap into to deliver information and insights to users on demand. Embedded analytics transform BI from sets of standalone products to enterprise services that make BI easier to use and pervasive.

„     BI as a container. Conversely, applications built using BI tools will serve as vehicles to launch operational processes and tasks, a kind of reverse embedding that some experts call “closed-loop BI.” For example, many companies now use dashboards to monitor key business events, trigger alerts and workflows, and execute tasks within operational applications. In addition, some packaged software vendors now use a dashboard as the central metaphor for delivering role-based views of tasks and information required to manage processes in and across multiple business departments.

Conclusion

Managers have the responsibility to make the best decision possible, based upon data available to them at the time. If their ability to analyze this data and transform it into useful information is improved, the overall quality of their decisions will be improved as well.

Business Intelligence provides a spectrum of tools and solutions to achieve this. It’s the underlying technology behind, and a key component of, more effective decision-making and improved organizational results.

While many small and medium-size companies have relied on spreadsheets as their primary BI tool, most of them have come to realize this is a stop-gap solution and one that’s apt to lead to data chaos and inconsistent analysis results. This is not to say that spreadsheets should be abandoned; rather they should be a part of an organization’s BI toolset, especially if used in conjunction with a commercial BI product suite that integrates with spreadsheet environments.

Shouldn’t your organization be using business intelligence technology to help it run its business more intelligently?

 

 

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world’s leading business intelligence Software Company, with more than 39,000 customers worldwide, including over 80% percent of the Fortune 500. Business Objects helps organizations of all sizes create a trusted foundation for decision making, gain better insight into their business, and optimize performance. The company’s innovative business intelligence suite, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry’s most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes the award winning Crystal line of reporting and data visualization software. Business Objects has also built the industry’s strongest and most diverse partner community, and offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.

Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Business Objects and the Business Objects logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects SA or its affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.