News & Views

2009 from SAP – “Typical uses of a BI solution for a midsize company are to:

• Determine the inventory level of a product or part
• Identify its best-selling products and see if this holds true in all of its distribution channels
• Identify customers that are cutting back on their purchases so that special inducements can be offered to retain them
• Implement dashboards and scorecards so that executives and supervisors can quickly recognize operational exceptions or key performance indicators (KPIs) that fall outside of accepted ranges
• Establish and monitor performance metrics and take corrective actions if they are in danger of not being met
• Compare departmental turnover to identify potential morale problems
• Compare year-to-date sales for this year with last year and forecast what sales are likely to be for the entire year
• Track customer orders and desired ship dates against finished-goods inventory and adjust the manufacturing production cycle and supply chain logistics to reduce inventory carrying costs
• Integrate operational, spreadsheet, and historic data for analysis purposes – while helping to stamp out “spreadsheet chaos” – to provide consistency and “a single version of the truth” for the organization
• Provide business users with the ability to perform their own ad hoc analyses without having to involve scarce IT resources
• Align daily operations with strategic objectives and quickly recognize when they are not in agreement…”

180 View – We thought the BI examples above would be useful. There is also other useful information in the article including “Business intelligence is not just about tools and their applications; it’s also concerned with distribution and control. Reports should be able to be published to the Web and delivered to a user’s preferred mobile device. However, not every employee should have access to every report or analysis – and administration, monitoring, security, and control are also part of the BI environment.”