How to improve performance? Improve productivity?
How to reduce your costs?
How to attract and retain new customers? Increase customer satisfaction?
As the pace of business gets faster and regulations increase, there is increased pressure on businesses to be able to make the right decisions in less time.
This implies that you should be able to get the right information at the right time in the right format... the basis of Business Intelligence.
If you lack control and management over your company’s information, the retrieval of data will take time and require effort, delaying decision time and putting increasedpressure on resources. This covers all areas of businesses: operations, production, finance, human resources, customer care, sales, marketing, regulatory compliance…
Even if your organisation is computerised, it does not necessarily mean you have the required information at hand. You can have a sales management software, without being able to access the information you need for current sales performance.
You need to go one step further to be able to gather information from all your different systems to project a report that can be used for analysis and decision making.
Business Intelligence applications can provide live reports displayed on scorecards and dashboards. For example, you could view at a click the current sales status of your different point of sales. You can immediately know whether you are on target, whether performance is exceeding expectations or is well below previsions. In the latest scenario, you can immediately think of corrective actions and take measures, launch a promotional campaign maybe, to improve the situation.
Without this live information, you could only observe the losses once it is too late and there is no action you can take. Business Intelligence applications allow you to have better control of your business.
Business Intelligence is also about better execution on strategy:
- Monitoring: What happened (via reporting) and what is happening (via scorecards and dashboards with live information).
- Analysis: Why this happened - here the person interprets reports and data to form an analysis.
- Planning: What do I want to happen (via planning, budgeting, consolidation) and what will happen (forecasting). This brings you back to monitoring whether budgets, plans and forecasts are realised.
By having immediate access to information, you allow yourself to foresee and influence what is going to happen. There is a shift from reactivity to proactivity when you master the understanding of your business.
The scorecards and dashboards are graphic representations of the current situation – they give you an overview of the situation to enable you to spot rapidly any discrepancies, problem areas. You are then able to drill down as much as necessary into the problem to analyse detailed numbers and information.
Reports and dashboards can be available on your desktop or even on your mobile phone, and come in a variety of formats. The important thing is that it is available in the format you need.
The dashboards could be displayed as a bar chart indicating sales or it could be a geographical map, it could be an overview by region, by attribute, by date... This is entirely customised for your business and your information needs. We can also embed reports directly in the applications we create.
In large organisations abroad, someone is often assigned the task of managing the organisation’s information and is responsible for providing the necessary information to decision makers at any given time. This person is also known as Chief Information Officer (CIO), a very important role that is often overlooked in Mauritian organisations.
In the past years, we have seen a real paradigm shift of the role of IT in organisations worldwide from a supporting role to a proactive role.
In 2003, 60% of businesses considered IT’s main role as to support and enable predefined business initiatives. Whereas only 40% considered IT should proactively envision business possibilities and initiate with technology. This tendency in 2007 was already reversed with 64% considering IT as having a proactive role in envisioning business possibilities.
The IT team’s basic concerns include document management system, servers, security, networking, collaboration tools, enterprise applications etc. These are basic requirements that enable and support the operations of the company.
To drive the company forward, the IT team’s main concern becomes business intelligence applications: these will enable to manage all the company’s information and make information readily available, at any given time, in the desired format, so that decision makers can immediately take proper decisions and actions.
It is clear that in the business environment we’re evolving in and the trends for a faster business pace and increased regulations, companies that are able to master their business intelligence will have a definite competitive advantage. |
