Business Intelligence – A useful guide to SMEs

"KonaBody">considered part of the BI spectrum – as are
Business Intelligence – A useful guide to SMEssearch capabilities to locate information and reports,
By Sunny Pokalapredictive analysis to discover hidden patterns and
Business Intelligence (BI), also referred to asenable ‘what-if’ analysis, scorecards
“decision support,” allowsand performance management to help monitor
organizations to better understand, analyze and evenbusiness metrics and key performance indicators
predict what is occurring in a company. In the past few(KPIs) such as customer satisfaction, profitability and
years, it has become one of the most commonlysales per employee in order to align individual and
deployed software technologies in the business world,departmental metrics and efforts with the
particularly in the developed economies, helpingorganization’s strategic goals.
executives, managers and professional analysts stayThe advanced analysis functionality permits
in touch with the on ground and current activities.organizations to define hierarchies so that, for example,
According to the definition provided by Wikipedia, BIsales could first be viewed for all the regions of the
refers to skills, technologies, applications and practicescompany and then the user could specifically view the
used to help a business acquire a better understandingsales in each state / country in each region. Other
of its commercial context. BI technologies provideadvanced analysis capabilities, such as filtering, can be
historical, current and predictive views of businessused to include or exclude specific stores, regions,
operations. In simple words, BI helps an organizationproducts or time periods in the analysis and the ability
turn a jumble of data into useful and meaningfulto look at the top 25 or bottom 25, or any other
information and then distribute this information to thosenumber, best or worst-performing products, stores or
who need it, when they need it so that they can makesalespeople.
timely and better-informed decisions. It allowsCore BI technology like query, reporting and interactive
organizations to combine data from a wide variety ofanalysis is used to view or analyze what is or has
sources and see an integrated, up-to-date andalready occurred, while data mining and predictive
360-degree view.analysis allows users to predict what may occur in the
This tool is especially important for SMEs, who whilefuture. BI uses sophisticated statistical techniques to
not having the vast resources of industry giants, arefind relationships that are hidden or not obvious. It can
typically able to quickly implement business decisions. BIbe used to identify which factors closely relate to
provides a win-win solution for IT and business userscustomer churn and attrition or which factors (e.g. a
by allowing the IT department to be more productive inprospective customer’s income, education,
working with its business users to service specialage, last purchase amount, etc.) were most closely
requests, while permitting these business users torelated to a successful response in a marketing
become more self-sufficient. Operations and analysiscampaign.
are two sides of the business and BI allows IT to be aBusiness intelligence is not just about tools and their
valued partner in both.applications; it is also concerned with distribution and
In this article, I have discussed a few points on how BIcontrol. Reports should be abled to be published onto
can help SMEs expand their base and stay in thethe web and delivered to a user’s preferred
growth trajectory. They are:mobile device. Also, by using BI against both operational
• Establish and monitor performance metricssystems and data warehouses, a company can
and take corrective actions if they are in danger of notimprove its daily operations and also compare current
being met.results with historic values to identify trends and snip
• Compare departmental turnover to identifythe problem right at the bud.
potential morale problems.The benefits of BI
• Identify the best selling products and see ifA major part of any manager’s job is to
this holds true in all of its retail outlets.make decisions. If you can improve the overall quality
• Implement dashboards and scorecards soof your organization’s decision-making
that executives and supervisors can quickly recognizeprocess, you will improve the overall effectiveness of
operational exceptions or when expenses are likely toyour organization. BI allows business users to analyze
exceed budget.and better understand their organization’s
• Identify customers who are cutting back onplans and results. It provides insight into what is working
their purchases so that special inducements can becorrectly while identifying potential problem areas in
offered to retain them.time for corrective actions to be taken. It can be used
• Compare year-to-date sales for this yearto recognize opportunities as well as problems and
with last year’s and forecast what sales arealert your organization to potential issues when
likely to be for the entire year.exceptional conditions occur, which are very likely to
• Track customer orders and desired shippingoccur in the SMEs.
dates against finished goods inventory and adjust theSince BI product suites include a variety of
manufacturing production cycle and supply chaincomponents, organizations can pick those that are
logistics to reduce inventory carrying costs.most appropriate for the task at hand and for the
• Integrate operational, spreadsheet andexperience level of their individual employees. While in
historic data for analysis purposes, while helping tothe past, only technical specialists typically used BI
stamp out “spreadsheet chaos” totools, most business people (particularly at a newly set
provide consistency and “a single version ofup or mid sized organization) can now successfully
the truth” for the organization.use them as well. This has served to democratize BI
• Provide business users with the ability tousage throughout organizations. The role of IT has
perform their own ad hoc analysis, without having topositively evolved from one of digging out from its
tie up scarce IT resources.historic report request backlog to one of monitoring
• Be better able to understand and analyzeand administrating BI usage and setting the appropriate
their own operations and their interactions with theircontrols relative to who can access what data. This BI
customer, in order to gain a competitive edge overself-sufficiency has provided business users with
their competitors.quicker response time and the ability to drill down and
• Keep a track of daily operations andperform interactive analysis while enabling IT to more
strategic objectives and quickly identify when they areeffectively and more efficiently serve its organizations.
not in agreement.While many managers and supervisors pride
The implementations of BI:themselves on their intuition, BI provides tools to help
The BI spectrum is very broad in terms of its tools andverify their insights and even discover new ones. It
functionality. At its core are the traditional capabilities ofpermits the new age business users to explore results
query, reporting and analysis. This is complemented byat a high level and then drill down to analyze the
data quality and data integration to accurately andunderlying details. Business intelligence is one of the
consistently consolidate data from multiple sources.primary keys to effective decision-making; hence it is
Dashboards and other visualization techniques can helpof immense benefit and assistance in any organization,
users quickly understand analysis results and are oftenparticularly SMEs.