Business Intelligence
Accounting and other business systems are packed with
useful, and often critical, business information which can
be turned to competitive advantage if analysed properly
and quickly. A new generation of low-cost business
intelligence tools is now becoming available to help mid-sized
organisations do just this.
Executive summary
In order to manage their financial operations, most mid-sized companies use either a standalone accounting application or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. These systems are ideal for capturing and processing transactional business data, but they were not designed to convert that data into meaningful business intelligence (BI), and they lack good analytical and reporting tools.
Many large organisations have addressed this problem by investing in sophisticated, expensive software and employing specialist analytical staff, but few mid-sized companies are able to do this. However, a growing number of BI applications are now available to mid-sized companies. These have the ability to bring together information from multiple sources to create a single view of the business and provide a complete management reporting and analytical function.
For the best part of a decade, and in some cases more, many very large businesses have enjoyed a secret advantage over their smaller counterparts: they have been able to turn at least some of the information stored in their vast databanks into raw, actionable intelligence. And in hundreds of well documented cases, this intelligence has provided them with significant competitive advantage.
There are dozens of examples: financial services giants have been able to identify which customers are most profitable, and which are the most risky; retailers have been able to calculate which customers are most likely to buy apparently unrelated products – and site these items near each other; manufacturers have been able to switch production lines by mapping weather forecasts to sales patterns; even police forces have been able to identify crime patterns and target resources accordingly.
What business intelligence can do
- Identify trends and patterns in the data to gain a better understanding of the business
- Transform data into actionable information
- Support future planning by identifying opportunities to increase revenue or reduce costs
- Reduce data duplication and use of multiple Excel files
- Make better and faster business decisions by analysing metrics and KPIs that are not easily measured in a non BI environment
- Produce management and ad-hoc reports
