Why Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence enables you to use data from the past and present to predict and plan for the future and communicate those predictions across your business.

Once in place a good business intelligence analysis tool can help:

• inform decision makers
• identify areas to cut costs
• identify customer behaviors
• explore new market opportunities
  
• streamline operations and
• help enterprises be more agile

In our solutions Business Intelligence does not:

• Require a capital expenditure
• Require laborious, costly consulting fees
• Necessitate a new hire request for a statistician
• Need to be intrusive
  

Business Intelligence encompasses various levels of analysis each building upon another.  For many companies a simple reporting solution is adequate. Some companies already have several reporting or visualization tools in place and are seeking to build upon those implementations.  The diagram below defines the various Business Intelligence solutions that we work with and how value increases with each subsequent level.

Selected Topic: How Does Business Intelligence Help Finance?

"It is vital to the board that the finance department can provide it with the ability to see exactly where it makes money, and where it doesn't," says James Clarkson, finance director at CP Group. "Before, we worked on best-estimate guesswork, and that resulted in us selling some products at a loss. Now, we have been able to adjust our pricing in a way that reflects our better understanding of how much it costs us to make and deliver a product to a customer - and the margins we want to make on doing so." Computer Weekly.

According to Computer Weekly a Business Intelligence system is of most value to Finance when it encompasse these areas of concern:

● Planning, budgeting and forecasting - contribution, aggregation, manipulation, and approval of the financial plan on a periodic or continual basis.

● Financial consolidations and reporting - legal and statutory consolidation systems, along with more generalised financial statement generation capabilities.

● Financial analytics and dashboards - profitability applications, role-specific dashboards, metrics, and specific financial analytics for detailed financial processes.

● Financial governance, risk management, and compliance - governance and control requirements that include national and international regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley or the International Financial Reporting Standards.

● Scorecards and strategy - methodology-based scorecards, such as the Balanced Scorecard, and strategy management applications.

We created this library of articles in an effort to educate on how to define, prepare for and implement the various flavors of analysis tools we design and develop.  Browse through our collection of revelant articles to become more educated on what BI is and whether you need it or not....HINT: If you want to out manuever your competitors or accurately plan for the future then you probably want some sort of Business Intelligence solution.

Selection of the week:

Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide

According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Data Management Survey of 2001, “Companies that manage their data as a strategic resource and invest in its quality are already pulling ahead in terms of reputation and profitability.”  This statement implies a quite subtle yet radical notion: Data should be treated as a strategic resource. According to a traditional view, data is the “fuel” driving the automation of a business operation, implying that a company uses computers to help run its business. The forward-looking view of data internalizes the notion that strategic knowledge is embedded in the collection of a company’s data and that extracting actionable knowledge will help a company improve its business. read more

If you are in search of technical information or want to read up on what we are currently working on you may be interested in reading our blog at: www.SherlockInformatics.com/wordpress