BI Tools Provide Benefits and Challenges!

Understand the Benefits and the Challenges of a Business Intelligence Strategy!

If you follow industry and business publications, you know that analytics are taking the lead in business strategy. Gartner states that, ‘90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.’ If your enterprise is implementing a business intelligence and analytics strategy, it is important to plan carefully and to understand the real benefits as well as the challenges of choosing the right BI tools and deploying these tools to users in a way that will ensure optimal user adoption and leverage of analytics to achieve the results you need.

‘Your business should carefully assess requirements and plan for expected user adoption by selecting a BI tool that will offer the features, ease-of-use and functionality your team members need.’

In this article, we provide examples of the various benefits of BI tools for specific business functions and some of the technology and user challenges you will face as you consider your options and plan for implementation.

Address the Challenges and Achieve the Benefits of BI Tools

No matter the business function, there are benefits to implementing a business intelligence strategy that will deploy these tools to your team members. Here are some examples:

Benefits

Finance – Your organization will be more efficient and profitable, with Ready-to-Use Dashboards, Analysis, and KPIs designed especially for the Finance domain. This business intelligence solution includes interactive Dashboards that allow users to perform intuitive, easy analysis of key metrics including Profitability, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payables, Cash Flow Analysis, Past Due Invoices, Balance Sheets, Income Statements and more!

Inventory – Inventory business function allows users to accurately plan and optimize inventory. Interactive Dashboards track item movement, compare sales to closing stock, and monitor warehouse stock and value, and answer critical questions regarding stock turnover ratio, seasonal buying, back-order assessment and safety stock to prevent lost sales. Users can analyze inventory levels to effectively manage stock based on the buying behavior of customers.

Purchasing and Procurement – Allows users to view and analyze spending details, analyze procurement data, drill through data to analyze issues, measure performance, identify savings opportunities, and track supplier performance. Identify reliable trading partners, analyze supplier cost, perform purchase rate comparisons, reveal trends, identify top/bottom vendors, and achieve timely insight into spending patterns and trends across all departments.

Production – Quantify and visualize data at the operational level to make fact-based decisions. Analyze Output, Reduce Labor Costs, Maintain Inventory Levels, Optimize Equipment Performance, Monitor Rejection Ratios and Downtime, and take action before problems arise to mitigate risk, and capitalize on opportunities. Publish automated reports to monitor and manage plant performance and provide management with quality metrics and relevant data.

These are just a few examples of how business intelligence can be used within a business function, department or business unit to benefit business users and to help the organization make fact-based decisions, spot trends and patterns and opportunities, and identify the root cause of problems.

If you want to take advantage of all of these benefits and ensure success of your business intelligence initiative, your business should carefully assess requirements and plan for expected user adoption by selecting a BI tool that will offer the features, ease-of-use and functionality your team members need.

Technology and User Challenges

Social BI

Your team members are also consumers and outside of the office they are used to a collaborate and social experience. By engaging in Social BI, your team can champion data sharing, collaborate on creative ways to analyze data and make quick work of data analytics, with tools that allow the user to ‘like’, ‘share’ and leverage other social tools and networking techniques.

Mobile BI

Not every BI tool provides real mobile business intelligence to accommodate every type of device, screen size and resolution. Choose a solution that has a Responsive and Adaptive UI engine, so you can roll out BI tools on any Desktop, Tablet or Smartphone without any device specific development. ‘Design once, Use anywhere’ concept in true sense.

Personalized Dashboards

Business users will not adopt a solution that limits them to predefined dashboards. Each user has a need to see and use data in a different way. Be sure to select a solution that allows your users to work in a way that is meaningful to them.

Interactive, NOT Restrictive

Choose a solution that will allow users to leverage deep dive analytics. There is no way an organization can anticipate every question or type of analytics a business user will need to incorporate into decision-making. Provide truly interactive tools that will assure user adoption and make your organization more agile.

Ease-of-Use

Advanced Data Discovery allows business users to perform early prototyping and to test hypothesis without the skills of a data scientist. Advanced Data Discovery ensures data democratization with Self-Serve Data Preparation, Smart Data Visualization and Plug n’ Play Predictive analysis that can drastically reduce the time and cost of analysis and experimentation.

‘No matter the business function, there are benefits to implementing a business intelligence strategy that will deploy these tools to your team members.’

Ready-To-Use Business Intelligence tools can support data democratization and improve your business results. If your business understands the challenges of implementing a business intelligence solution and adequately plans for implementation and user adoption, it can leverage the benefits of these tools and solutions and ensure success. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.

Original Post : Address the Challenges and Achieve the Benefits of BI Tools!

3 Ways Cross-Tab BI Can Improve Reporting!

By some estimates, a business will experience a three-month lag between the time a report is produced and the point at which the enterprise sees improvement or results from the changes the report recommends or predicts. If the reporting is unclear or unconvincing, the recommendations may never be implemented and the report will sit in a file on someone’s computer.

Prepare for Success with the Right BI Tools!

4 Things to Know to Prepare for BI Tools and Data Democratization!

The days of data silos and exclusive data access are over. Data Scientists and business analysts are still an important component of the business and IT teams are still crucial to the success and stability of the organization BUT if you are thinking that these roles are still responsible for day-to-day analytics and delivering every bit of data analysis to the enterprise, your business strategy needs an upgrade!

Self-Serve BI and Augmented Analytics Has Many Rewards!

Address the Challenges and Enjoy the Benefits of Self-Serve BI Tools!

If you are a business manager, senior executive, IT professional or analytical professional, you are probably well aware of the emergence of business intelligence solutions, BI tools and augmented analytics for business users. In all likelihood, you have been hearing about these trends in annual conference and industry journals. If your business has not yet adopted such an initiative, it is likely to do so within the next year. But it might surprise you to know that, world renowned technology research firm, Gartner, predicts that ‘By 2022, augmented analytics will be ubiquitous, but only 10% of users will use it to its full potential.’ Given the focus and effort invested in business intelligence and augmented analytics, this prediction is disappointing, but understandable.

Mobile BI Improves User Adoption and ROI!

Here’s How Mobile BI Encourages User Adoption and TCO!

Businesses that invest in business intelligence solutions expect to achieve results, become more competitive and improve productivity, but these businesses often fail to understand the need for Mobile BI. Mobile business intelligence should provide all the features and search capability a user needs to perform tasks and get information while on the road, working remotely or visiting a client, partner or regional office.

Case Study : Augmented Analytics OEM Partnership for U.S. Healthcare ERP Business

Augmented Analytics OEM Partnership for U.S. Healthcare ERP Business

Our Partner is a healthcare service provider in the United States providing a web-based, patient-centric, healthcare management solution and workflow solutions to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs for its hospitals and healthcare facility Clients. Since 1999, the Partner has provided services to the durable medical equipment and supply market with solutions that benefit many healthcare organizations and clinics in the U.S.

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How Can I Get My Business Users to Adopt Augmented Analytics?

Drive User Adoption with Embedded BI and Single Sign-On Convenience!

All of your business users have a favorite software application – an app they value because it helps them do their job more easily, or helps them get crucial information. These are the applications they have learned and they are used to leveraging them on a day-to-day basis to perform tasks. When you introduce augmented analytics into your business environment, one of the most critical factors is whether you can expect user adoption. Finding and implementing the right augmented analytics solution is just the first step. If you can’t get your users to USE the application, your return on investment (ROI) will be poor and your total cost of ownership (TCO) will be high.

Case Study : Audit & Compliance Analytics for a Leading Private Bank in India

Audit & Compliance Analytics for a Leading Private Bank in India

The Partner is based in India and offers an Audit, Compliance and Risk Management solution for banks, insurance companies and financial institutions. The comprehensive solution helps organizations to improve efficiency and effectiveness of audit department operations by standardizing organizational audit procedures to manage internal risks and compliance.

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Democratize BI Tools: Information is Power!

Why Democratize Business Intelligence? Lots of Reasons!

Perhaps you have resisted the temptation to democratize data in your organization. Your resistance may come from in-house, in the form of those who tell you that data governance is impossible in an environment where you spread your data far and wide. Perhaps you believe that the average business user cannot and will not use business intelligence tools, so any expense or time to implement such a solution would be wasteful. Perhaps you feel that the value of such a solution and of user adoption of these tools is overrated, and that ROI and TCO would not be worth the time and effort.