Your staff probably uses multiple software applications to support your company’s different departments and functions. Your finance team may use ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or an accounting system, while your sales team uses CRM (Customer Relationship Management): and chances are your operations team is using industry-specific LOB (Line of Business) applications. All of these types of software applications come with canned reports that are written for the “average” user.
The “Average” User
Canned reports allow you to specify products, date ranges, document numbers or other parameters, to generate a standard format version of the report. Data is pulled directly from the application tables that were defined after the report was designed. The format includes rows and columns that are arranged based on what “average” users need.
But what if you need more information than the “average” user; or if the canned reports don’t reflect the information you need to run your business?
Information That’s “Above Average”
A Business Intelligence (BI) Solution combines data from all the applications within your organisation. It delivers “reports” and encourages users to look deeper, past high-level information, to find causes and solutions. With this in-depth information, users can look at data from every angle and make above-average decisions.
What Will a BI Solution Allow Us To Do?
- Move the focus from high-level reports, cubes and dashboards to the transactional detail that’s behind the numbers.
- Create and distribute graphs and charts, and provide information that will be easy and quick to comprehend for all team members and management.
- View only information that is appropriate to the user’s role.
- Access, build and save views of information that are important to users.
Charts, views and dashboards can be easily manipulated to view any combination of data points, allowing for new insight into causes, effects and solutions. This also provides immediate responses to allow for more informed decisions.
Replacing reports with Business Intelligence Solutions allows you to tap into information and respond faster, keeping you ahead of the competition!
