What is Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence can turn your managers into key performers

As an Interactive analytic tool to view and query exsting corporate data from any possible angle, Business Intelligence allows your managers to derive effective Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to facilitate their decision making process. In addition to integrate a "What-If" analysis in the query, It also allows you to combine any number of measurable parameters to form a meaningful and effective analysis.

Business Intelligence & Enterprise Information Systems

Traditional enterprise information systems (EIS) like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps your business to run the daily operation. These systems usually collect and generate a lot of operational data such as customer profile, sales order, inventory etc. By nature, the reporting and analytic mechanism of these systems are static, predefined and limited in scope.

On the other hand, Business Intelligence supplements your existing EIS by providing your managers an Interactive analytic tool to query and view these data. It is flexible and powerful because your decision makers can analyze the data in the way they want, without any limitation. For example, with Business Intelligence, your managers are able to answer these questions very easily:

• Are we on target to achieve monthly-end goals? by product and by region?
  
  
• Have some of our new products failed to achieve their expected penetration? and should they be withdrawn?
  
  
• Is our advertising budget properly allocated? Do we see a rise in sales for products and in areas where we run campaigns?
  
  
• Do outlets with similar demographic characteristics perform in the same way, or are some doing much worse than others? Why?

Business Intelligence Applications

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Data Mart, Data Warehouse, Data Mining. From a user standpoint, all of these are under the category of Business Intelligence.

In general, Business Intelligence can be applied to:

• Sales Reporting & Profitability Analysis
• Financial Reporting & Analysis
• Budgeting & Forecasting
• "What-If" Analysis
• Management Reporting
• Manufacturing
• Product Line & Market Analysis
• Customer and Vendor Analysis
• Asset Management
• Balanced Scorecard
• HR Analysis
• Job Costing
• Enterprice Performance Management