Use Business Intelligence to increase the profits in your business

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is an all encompassing term that includes Business Performance Management (BPM) and Balanced Scorecards, the latest necessary tools for business.

Put simply! it can be described as “taking your business data, from whatever source, internal or external, and turning it into real information to drive business decision making�

There is a wealth of data available in any business. There is sales order and invoice data, there is customer data, product data, supplier data, stock data, and much more, including external sources. The taking all of this and creating an information system which can be utilised by people throughout the organisation, to analyse, gain insight into it and take action to improve the effectiveness and profitability of it, is very powerful. Business decisions can then be made according to fact rather than “gut feeling� as is so often the case.

Business Intelligence systems are fundamentally OLAP systems. OLAP is an acronym for on line analytical processing. It core features are FASMI

• Fast
• Analysis of
• Shared
• Multi-dimensional
• Information

All of these features are vital. Speed is often of the essence in decision making. The analysis must be against consistent (shared) data, there must be one version of the truth. Data in today’s organisation is multi-dimensional and inter-related and any analysis will usually require the examination of many or all of the relationships. Lastly, and maybe most vital the information must be available in a form that is readily usable, in grids, charts or any other visual form that assists the decision maker.

Data can reside in many ways. In spreadsheets, in relational databases etc. The system should be able to take data from a variety of sources and provide users with the power and flexibility to view it in every conceivable way.

Invariably a further benefit of BI systems is that complex scheduling and provision of reports by the IT department becomes a thing of the past, as Management Information is provided by the users themselves, or published by Analysts, as it is required.