Wayne argues that finance departments are uniquely positioned to do so, simply because they sit in the nexus of corporate information.  Continuously collecting data from across the organization enables finance departments to capture the full picture.  This is possible only if they have the means to analyze large amounts of data from different systems, formats, and timestamps.  This is a daunting task when the only tool you have is oceans of spreadsheets created from unaudited macros.  Business Intelligence can help you accomplish all of that and more, faster, more accurately, and at a lower cost.

Some of the benefits of Business Intelligence for SMB (and for that matter any size organization) are:

• In a CEO meeting, everyone agrees on revenue, profit and cost, and they discuss plans and actions to better achieve corporate goals, as oppose to arguing over the numbers.

• CFO can check the company’s overall profit/lost position daily, and with a click of a button, can view the contribution of every group, region and individual and then identify areas of business that requires his/her attention.

• VP of Finance can monitor company progress towards achieving corporate goals, without IT assistant.

• Controller can automate consolidations of financial transaction across all business units in couple of seconds and prepare period statuary reports in a few hours or days.

• Financial analyst can go to one place to prepare ad-hoc analysis for executives or run standard reports without having to do countless conversions using custom rules and macros in unaudited and error prone spreadsheets.

Business Intelligence is not a replacement for spreadsheets; instead it helps number crunchers to access more accurate data, faster,  with less effort,  and higher level of trust.

Business intelligence also helps with proactive delivery of highly personalized reports and analytics, which is not possible by spreadsheet technology.

Common applications of Business Intelligence in finance department are:

• Financial reporting and analysis
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Profit/loss analysis
• Regulatory compliance and reporting

If you are not taking advantage of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence benefits, this is a great time to contact your trusted technology partner to find out how your business could benefit from these new power tools.

Specializing in predictive analysis, AnalyticsPoint constructs executive dashboard software and other business intelligence tools to gather and organize business objects so that executives can maximize benefits from performance management software.  Tools such as a data warehouse and balanced scorecard are used to enhance enterprise business intelligence so that companies can understand and react to circumstances and opportunity with lightning speed and precision.

Tooraj Kazeminy
Founder & CEO
AnalyticsPoint

Business Intelligence systems benefit organizations by helping put accurate and timely information at the fingertips of decision makers. Undoubtedly some of the most important corporate decisions relates to customers, sales and financials. It should come as no surprise that most common applications of Business Intelligence are related to these subjects. These common applications are:

• Sales Analytics
• Operational Analytics
• Financial Reporting & Analytics
• Compliance Analytics
• Risk Analytics
• Pricing Analytics
• Operations Analytics
• Spatial Analytics
• Website Analytics
• Product Management Analytics
• Inventory Management Analytics

Today the most widely used Business Intelligence application by small and medium sized companies (SMB) are Sales Analytics and Customer Analytics and Financial Reporting. These three applications alone can dramatically help companies by help identify new sales opportunities, increase customer satisfaction and reduce the revenue cycle.  Imagine seamlessly identifying cross sell opportunities, Anticipating customer order issues in advance and quickly invoicing the completed jobs.

Identifying the non-performing products/business partners could also be vital to the company’s success. Eliminating non-performing products/business partners could positively impact the overall profitability by reducing allocated resources to manage the product/relationship and hence improve the financial standing of the organization.

For example, if your organization makes money from successful sales by business affiliates to leads generated by you, then you need to maintain a high closing rate to attract the right kind of business partners. Identifying and eliminating non-performing business affiliates is one way to achieve higher closing rate.

Also keeping tap on operation, helps anticipating issues and be prepared to proactively and properly addressing them, in order to increase the likelihood of on-time delivery.

So anytime you need to crunch large volume of numbers, prepare reports from data spread into multiple internal/external systems, seamlessly share information with peers, managers, customers and regulators or setup proactive alerts based on critical business events, remember that Business Intelligence systems can make your life much much easier.

If you are not taking advantage of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence benefits, this is a great time to contact your trusted technology partner to find out how your business could benefit from these new power tools.

Specializing in predictive analysis, AnalyticsPoint constructs executive dashboard software and other business intelligence tools to gather and organize business objects so that executives can maximize benefits from performance management software. Tools such as a data warehouse and balanced scorecard are used to enhance enterprise business intelligence so that companies can understand and react to circumstances and opportunity with lightning speed and precision.

Tooraj Kazeminy
CHIEF KNOWLEDGE OFFICER
AnalyticsPoint

Although, commonly used business applications such as MAS 90, salesforce.com, SAP, QuickBook do provide access to data and could produce large sets of reports, but they are designed to access a single record at a time. These applications are optimized for record maintenance tasks such as adding, deleting or updating a record. Not only these systems do not have the necessary functionalities for data analysis, bu also the available data in each of these systems is a fraction of the data available across all applications within the organization.

For the purpose of reporting on large amounts of data in business applications, there is a need for a process to collect and integrate this data into a single repository. This requires a software tool that is capable of providing secure, quick, flexible, and scalable access to this data. That repository is the Data Warehouse (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) is the software tool.

Industrial strength Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as MicroStrategy , Business Objects , etc. enable accessing data in the following five styles in order to maximize return on data assets without the need to reinvent the wheel:

• 1: Scorecards & Dashboards, to visually convey facts at-a-glance
• 2: Enterprise Reporting, for pixel-perfect report formats
• 3: Cube Analysis, to slice-and-dice the data
• 4: Predictive Analysis, to perform predictive and statistical analysis
• 5: Alerts and Proactive Notification, for timely delivery of reports based on business events

Greater Than the Sum of All Parts

Virtually all business applications today have reporting capabilities with various degrees of effectiveness. However interpreting these reports in the context of the larger picture requires linking and incorporating them together. Have you ever tried this integration before? if so, then you know it is not as simple as it sounds. Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence tools and processes integrate data from disparate systems and provide a single view view of the business. Also by standardizing business metrics, BI tools provide a single version of the truth across the organization.

Having witnessed Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence systems in action for the past decade has convinced me that a single integrated view of the business along with single version of the truth represent far more value than obtaining reports from disparate systems.

If you are not taking advantage of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence benefits, this is a great time to contact your trusted technology partner to find out how your business could benefit from these new power tools.

Specializing in predictive analysis, AnalyticsPoint constructs executive dashboard software and other business intelligence tools to gather and organize business objects so that executives can maximize benefits from performance management software. Tools such as a data warehouse and balanced scorecard are used to enhance enterprise business intelligence so that companies can understand and react to circumstances and opportunity with lightning speed and precision.

Tooraj Kazeminy
CHIEF KNOWLEDGE OFFICER
AnalyticsPoint

There are at least three fundamental differences between transactional business systems and Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence systems:

1. Quick Singular Transactions versus Fast Reading of Large Data Sets
2. Detached Data versus Integrated Data
3. Volatile Data versus Non-Volatile Data

The most common types of transactional/operational business systems are those that help businesses maintain customer and vendor contact information, keep track of daily operation, inventory and resource management, as well as accounting.  These systems are also referred to as CRM and ERP.

Transactional/operational systems are designed and built to maintain (add/update/erase) daily operational data (business transactions,) quickly and completely. Large number of records associated with a single business transaction is spread across many database tables. The data in operational systems change frequently to reflect new transactions. For example a customer may change his/her contact information or marriage status. Because data is scattered around in multiple tables, building a complete picture of the relevant transactions will require significant data processing resources.

In contrary to the CRM, ERP, and other transactional/operational business systems, Data Warehouse systems are designed to quickly read and digest large volumes of data, in order to support decision making process via interactive slide and dice of the critical business information. The main characteristics of Data Warehouse systems are: 1) Data is summarized, to facilitate quick access/reporting, 2) Data is integrated from various sources to enable monitoring business activity across the enterprise, 3) Data is the collection of operational data snapshots to facilitate historical and trend reporting and analysis.

If you are not taking advantage of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence benefits, this is a great time to contact your trusted technology partner to show you how your business could benefit from these new power tools.

Specializing in predictive analysis, AnalyticsPoint constructs executive dashboard software and other business intelligence tools to gather and organize business objects so that executives can maximize benefits from performance management software.

Tools such as a data warehouse and balanced scorecard are used to enhance enterprise business intelligence so that companies can understand and react to circumstances and opportunity with lightning speed and precision.

Tooraj Kazeminy
CHIEF KNOWLEDGE OFFICER
AnalyticsPoint

Large enterprises have been benefiting from Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for decades. They have used these tools to optimize operation, lower cost, increase revenue, and ultimately stay ahead of the competition. Numerous studies demonstrate companies that use Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence are more profitable by a margin of 5% to 10%.

Some of the well known companies that use Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence are:
Google, Yahoo, eBay, Netflix, Walmart, Comcast Communications, Disney, the Home Depot, Whole Food Market, Target Corporation, Visa International, Wells Fargo Bank, Verizon Services Corp, Pfizer, Merck & Co, CVS Caremark, Godiva, Gucci, Starbucks Corporation, GEICO Corporation, 24 Hour Fitness, facebook, and Amazon.

Traditionally these tools and techniques have been cost prohibitive for small and medium sized companies; however recent advancements in computer storage technologies and proliferation of Business Intelligence software vendors, has resulted in dramatically lower cost of ownership to the point that these systems are now affordable to companies of all sizes, including start-ups as well as small & medium sized businesses (SMB.)

If as a corporate decision maker you are not already benefiting from data warehousing and business intelligence, make sure to follow our future postings as we describe how you can use these great tools and processes to level the playing field with your large enterprise competitors.

If you are already benefiting from Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, contact us to find out how we can turbo charge your system.

Tooraj Kazeminy
CHIEF KNOWLEDGE OFFICER
AnalyticsPoint