Tag: KPI Software

Combine Traditional and Modern BI for the Best Results!

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September 17, 2024

Give Your Team Traditional and Modern BI in One Solution

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions have been around for some time. The traditional BI tools were designed to be used by the IT team, business analysts and data scientists and utilized sophisticated features which required specialized knowledge and skills possessed only by the technical and analytical community. In this environment, business users were consumers of content, and while they could access information from dashboards, reports and KPIs, they had very limited access to date and they could not interact with that data. Where users had access to data, BI objects, reports and dashboards were developed, provisioned and presented to them by the IT team, so the business user had no control over what they could see or the format of the data.

‘In the past, business users were restricted to analytical content provided by IT staff and Data Scientists with limited interaction and access to data’

Gartner predicted that ‘…smart/augmented, nonrelational-, search- and visual-based data discovery capabilities will converge into a single set of next generation data discovery capabilities as components of modern BI and analytics platforms.’

When You Combine Traditional and Modern BI Tools, You Give Your Team Comprehensive Support

In line with Gartner predictions, the new world of Augmented Analytics and Modern BI solutions enables end-users and team members to access and use business intelligence (BI) to combine their industry and functional knowledge with clear, concise data. These new solutions are focused on business users, and on their empowerment, placing the power of true insight into the hands of business users and transitioning business users into Citizen Data Scientists. These solutions provide more value to the organization, improving technology Return on Investment (ROI), Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increasing efficiency with fact-based decisions. Modern BI and Augmented Analytics offers data integration and sophisticated analytical models and techniques in an easy-to-use interface that provides auto-suggestions and recommendations to speed the analytical process and ensure that users get what they need. It also provides report formats, publishing tools, alerts and analysis that can be shared by team members to encourage user adoption and collaboration.

As the needs of the average user evolve, most businesses find that a combination of traditional BI tools and Modern BI tools will best meet the needs of the team and ensure that every team member has the tools they need to get the job done.

Here are the primary features and functionality your business will need to capture Traditional Business Intelligence components and provide comprehensive coverage for your team. These solutions allow the IT staff to provide dashboards and reports for business user consumption and review:

  • Personalized Dashboards – Users with average technical skills can design personalized dashboards in minutes without programming knowledge.
  • Multidimensional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – The team can define KPIs using an intuitive expression engine and KPI software to set polarity, frequency and threshold levels.
  • Social Business Intelligence – Imagine an environment where business users can access a business intelligence and analysis portal and see popular data to rate, share and comment.
  • What-If Analysis – Enables business users to determine how a prospective change to a product, service, resource allocation, budget, schedule, pricing, raw material cost, labor cost, or other factors might affect the business bottom line.
  • Graphical Analysis – Business users can leverage stunning visualizations, alerts for exceptions and trends, and intuitive, mobile BI dashboards with true deep dive capabilities!
  • Mobile Business Intelligence – Business intelligence solutions your business users can enjoy with high-performance BI tools that will work on any size or type of device.
  • GeoMap Support – Users can leverage geo maps, analyze data for any location, and define geographic areas with support for drill down, spot lighter and other features.
  • Exceptions and Personalized Alerts – With exception reporting users can define thresholds, monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and metrics, and even receive alerts when exceptions occur with the ability to set, modify and delete alerts based on specific thresholds.
  • R Integration – Integrates seamlessly with R (the popular open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing), so users can integrate any R script with simple input and output configuration.
  • Print Reports – The IT team can leverage a simple, basic programming or scripting environment to define format templates and produce reports for delivery by email.
  • Web-Based BI Reports – Business intelligence reporting software enables users to point-and-click and drag-and-drop to create a report summarizing performance metrics, or operational data, without programming or database or SQL skills.

Modern BI and Advanced Analytics – Augmented Analytics enables the transition from business user to Citizen Data Scientist and supports data democratization and data literacy, allowing Data Scientists to focus on strategy and business user access to analytics to perform day-to-day analytics.

  • Assisted Predictive Modeling – Predictive analytics for business users provides predictive modeling capability assisted by auto-recommendations and auto-suggestions to simplify use and optimize outcomes, allowing business users to predict outcomes without the expertise of a data scientist.
  • Auto Insights – The Auto Insights Smarten toolset allows business users to simply select the dataset to be analyzed and let the system interpret the dataset, select important columns of data, analyze its type and variety and other parameters and use intelligent machine learning to automatically apply the best algorithm and analytical technique and provide data insights.
  • Key Influencer Analytics – Focus on what matters and find the most relevant influencers for your target KPIs. Business users often find it difficult to identify the right targets and to understand relationships and factors that influence results.
  • Anomaly Analysis – Reveal trends, anomalies and answers, map targets, focus on influencers that matter and adapt to succeed.
  • Smart Data Visualization – Smart data visualization allows business users to view and analyze data to identify a problem and clarify a root cause and to make confident decisions.
  • Self-Serve Data Preparation – Smart data discovery tools and augmented data preparation features allow business users with average skills to perform data preparation and transform, shape, reduce, combine, explore, clean, sample and aggregate data, without the need for SQL skills, ETL or other programming language.

‘As the needs of the average user evolve, most businesses find that a combination of traditional BI tools and Modern BI tools will best meet the needs of the team and ensure that every team member has the tools they need to get the job done.’

There are other many other features and components available to support users, IT, business analysts and data scientists in the traditional and modern analytics environment.

To find out more about Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions And Reporting, Contact Us. Discover the power of Augmented Analytics and see how your team can benefit from fact-based decisions, and cost-effective analytics and achieve a market advantage.

Original Post: Combine Traditional and Modern BI for the Best Results!

How Can Data Visualization Help Me Achieve Business Results?

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August 27, 2024

Reporting and Data Visualization Improves Team Understanding!

Statistics reveal that many people learn best when they see a story or information depicted in an image. Graphs, charts with colors, lines and shapes can often tell a story and communicate issues, challenges and opportunities in a business environment.

According to Forbes, ‘Almost eighty-thousand scientific studies attest that visual images promote retention.’

‘Visualization and presentation formats can include personalized dashboards and visualization techniques, alerts for exceptions and trends, and intuitive, mobile BI dashboards.’

Let’s consider a few examples of data presentation to illustrate how images, graphs, charts and visualization techniques can improve data understanding and retention.

How Can Data Visualization Help Me Achieve Business Results?

Cross Tabulation – Data presentation consists of categorization of data into groups, such as products, geographies, demographics, etc. It can be very useful in understanding sales results, product pricing response, target audience assessment, etc. Cross tab analytics can help your team understand market research, survey responses, seasonality and other factors.

KPI Reports – Key Performance Indicators (AKA KPI) can provide metrics in a dashboard environment that is easy to understand, so users can monitor and manage success factors, and quickly see where there are problems. KPI reporting can be used to identify and capitalize on opportunities and to adjust to challenges in the market and within the walls of the organization.

Custom Print Presentations and Reports – Every organization has a need for custom reports. Needs vary from division to department to user, and these needs can be expensive to accommodate. Custom reports to present data for decision-making, or to monitor results on an ongoing basis are crucial to the organization. But if the enterprise has to ask IT or business analysts or data scientists to satisfy the need, they are losing productivity, time and efficiency. By giving users the ability to design, format and product reports for a particular staff meeting or project, the enterprise can keep the process moving and ensure that the team has what they need to gather, analyze and understand results in a meaningful way. Custom formats might include customer statements, management reports, compliance reports, project templates, etc. Users can present data in a clean, colorful, attractive way to satisfy customers, partners, suppliers, executives and team members.

‘According to Forbes, ‘Almost eighty-thousand scientific studies attest that visual images promote retention.’

These are just a few examples of reporting formats and types, and how they might help your enterprise. Other types of visualization and presentation formats can include personalized dashboards and visualization techniques, alerts for exceptions and trends, and intuitive, mobile BI dashboards.

Team members, managers and executives typically think of reporting and presentation as boring, detailed and unintelligible. They rarely see the value in using data to make decisions when, in fact, this approach is the wisest and produces the best results. But it is understandable that the staff, customers, partners and suppliers would cringe when a report is placed in front of them, emailed to them or presented on a screen.

What if you could create, format, present and share data in a way that quickly communicated results, delivered a message, identified an issue or illustrate dan opportunity? Change the way your enterprise uses and interacts with data, with clean, clear, concise, elegant and colorful presentation.

Explore the benefits of Smarten Reports, and Pixel Perfect Print Reports and the use of this this seamless PDF Pixel Perfect Reports Solution, and the Smarten suite of Augmented Analytics can support your business users with self-serve tools that are intuitive and will encourage user adoption and fact-based decision-making.

Original Post : How Can Data Visualization Help Me Achieve Business Results?

Self-Serve KPIs Allow Teams to Manage and Adapt!

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August 8, 2023

BI Tools with Self-Serve Multidimensional KPIs Enable Agility and Accuracy!

Gartner research reveals that, ‘data literacy will become an explicit and necessary driver of business value, demonstrated by its formal inclusion in over 80% of data and analytics strategies and change management programs.’ When  businesses adopt and embrace business intelligence and augmented analytics, the expectation is that the enterprise will benefit by improving data literacy as well as productivity.

But if your business wants to make the most out of BI tools and augmented analytics, it is important to choose the right solution; one that is easy to use and will provide clear results – results business users can leverage to make decisions and to plan accurately. To understand the results and whether policies, processes and tasks are effective, your organization must establish metrics, and those metrics must also be clear.

‘Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are crucial to this feature set, as they provide critical metrics that enable the business to discover and manage results objectively and to adapt and change quickly and effectively.’

A solution that provides easy-to-use, multidimensional key performance indicators (KPIs) will allow your team to establish metrics that are unique to your needs and to your industry and market and help the enterprise understand how the business measures up in the competitive market, how well the products and services are faring with customers and whether workflow and business processes are having the desired effect.

Multidimensional KPIs Provide Easy-to-Use, Objective Metrics

Benefits of Self-Serve, Multidimensional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

  • When the organization gives business users the tools to establish and manage KPIs, it can become more productive. There is no waiting for the IT team or a data scientist to produce important reports, so the team can be agile and flexible.
  • Interactive KPIs provide tools to gather, analyze and measure with breakdown and dynamic frequency and slice and dice so users can focus on critical metrics and gain true insight into results. Users can leverage a powerful expression engine to set polarity, frequency and threshold levels in a browser-based interface and go beyond static monitoring to change frequencies, and dimension breakdowns and gain an understanding of performance and issues.
  • Users can establish and monitor KPIs at the individual, team, department, division, and company level and KPIs are integrated with other features to further analyze trends. Multidimensional KPIs gives business users the opportunity to monitor and manage results against goals and objectives and change processes, tasks, and activities as and when change is required.

‘When your business chooses a BI tool, it is important to choose the right solution; one that is easy to use and will provide clear results – results business users can leverage to make decisions and to plan accurately.’

If your business wishes to improve data literacy and productivity by implementing or upgrading a Business Intelligence or Augmented Analytics solution, it is imperative that you review the available modules, tools and features to ensure that the solution provides easy-to-use, sophisticated functionality that is suitable for your business users. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are crucial to this feature set, as they provide critical metrics that enable the business to discover and manage results objectively and to adapt and change quickly and effectively.

Choose a  Business Intelligence Reporting Solution that include Multi-Dimensional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Provide business intelligence that your IT team can easily implement and support, and a solution that business users will want to adopt. Choose  flexible, agile business intelligence solutions that can be used at all levels to collaborate, share data, and report and communicate with clarity. Self-Serve BI Tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your data democratization and user adoption goals.

Original Post : Multidimensional KPIs Provide Easy-to-Use, Objective Metrics!

KPIs and BI Dashboards Must Be Interactive!

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February 27, 2023

Key Performance Indicators and BI Tools to Support Your Business with Dynamic, Interactive Features!

There is no room in today’s business world for speculation or guesswork! Whether you are presenting to your Board of Directors, making a recommendation to your management team, or pitching a new product or idea, objective, provable results and information are required. In order to succeed in business, team members must have access to tools that allow them to establish and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) with measurable results so that the business can adapt to change, alter and adjust activities and tasks that do not provide successful outcomes, and build on success using models that have historically proven to achieve results.

‘Take the time to select a business intelligence solution that will advance your business interests and provide clear insight and help you to measure results.’

According to recent research, businesses use one of the following methods to capture and measure key performance indicators (KPIs): Spreadsheets, Dashboards and Reporting Tools, BI and Analytical Software.

In fact, the option that is likely to provide the most success is one that will eliminate human error in data entry and calculation of formulae and metrics. That would seem to suggest that a BI and Analytical software tool is the best way to establish and manage KPIs. But the sheer volume and complexity of enterprise data, distributed across the organization can be overwhelming.

BI Tools Should Have Multidimensional KPIs & Slice and Dice

Here are some important considerations for your business that will help you to choose the right BI tools and KPI features:

  • By gathering and integrating data from disparate systems and selecting a business intelligence solution that incorporates augmented analytics suitable for business users, the business can create a foundation upon which to build its success.
  • When selecting a BI tool, be sure to look at the capabilities provided for managing key performance indicators. With the right approach, the enterprise can achieve measurable and clear insight into key business objectives, so you can set goals, develop strategies to achieve these goals and objectively evaluate your performance and progress.
  • Look for business intelligence software that allows business users with average technology skills to define KPIs using an easy-to-use, powerful expression engine and to set polarity, frequency and threshold levels using a browser-based interface.
  • Avoid static reporting that will frustrate business users and instead give them interactive tools that are dynamic and will allow them to explore, slice and dice and get to the heart of the matter. KPIs should not be limited to static monitoring.
  • Choose KPI Analytics that provide interactive options to change frequencies, dimension break downs and drill down to further analyze trends, and reasons for performance and non-performance.
  • Remember that KPI tools are designed to be used. If you want your users to adopt these tools and use them on a daily basis, you will need an easy way to measure results and to make adjustments to workflow, processes and activities and adjust KPIs as appropriate. This method of continuous monitoring and management ensures that users can resolve issues and capitalize on opportunities as they arise.

‘A BI and Analytical software tool is the best way to establish and manage KPIs.’

Your business management team understands the need for clear, objective metrics. Be sure you take the time to select a business intelligence solution that will advance your business interests and provide clear insight and help you to measure results, adapt to the changing market and create an environment of continuous improvement.

BI tools with Multidimensional Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) features should provide data analytics access for all business users. Simple, self-serve BI tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your goals. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.

Original Post : BI Tools Should Have Multidimensional KPIs & Slice and Dice!

Use a BI Tool with Cross-Tab Deep Dive Features!

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January 20, 2023

Why It’s Important to Include Cross-Tab Deep Dive in Self-Serve BI Tools!

When a business decides to implement a self-serve business intelligence (BI solution, it must ensure that the tools really are ‘self-serve’ and that they provide the flexibility and agility to give power users the ability to create and analyze, and business users with average technology skills the ability to quickly and easily understand the augmented analytics tools they now have access to, and to use those tools to the benefits of the team and the organization.

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Is Mobile BI Crucial for Business Success?

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December 15, 2022

The Mobile BI Market is Growing! Make Sure You Select the Right Solution

In today’s mobile society, no enterprise can afford to overlook the importance of mobile access for business applications. Your team may be working remotely, or out of the office meeting with clients or a sales team. Whatever the case, mobile access to apps is crucial to productivity and collaboration. Business Intelligence solutions are no exception!

‘If the mobile BI solution is not flexible and seamless so that it operates on all devices; if it does not provide all features and functionality in a mobile environment, business users will be frustrated.’

According to recent research, the global mobile analytics market is projected to reach $28 million USD within the next decade. The reasons for that growth include an expanded interest in data democratization and the use of analytics among team members throughout the business organization, as well as a need for mobile access to optimize resources and ensure productivity.

The choice of solution is key to success and any mobile BI solution the business considers must support both Android and iOS, and operate in a ‘design once, use anywhere’ approach that accommodates desktops, tablets, and smart phones with an intelligent, adaptive user interface (UI) that supports any screen resolution and any size screen with seamless navigation and performance.

Mobile BI Ensures Access to Critical Data for Business Users

Anytime, Anywhere – Team members are more tech savvy today and they will not accept or adopt solutions that are restrictive or cumbersome. A mobile business intelligence solution must provide support for a fast-paced work environment and support users in the office and on the road.

Designed to Support Growth and Change – The mobile BI solution must support growth and be flexible to expand user volume, multiple locations and changes in business processes, reporting needs, etc.

Integrated Data Access – The mobile BI solution must be easy to use and operate out-of-the-box without customization to enable access to data for analytics, working across disparate data sources to serve seamless, clear information on mobile devices.

Comprehensive Features – Features should include the ability to personalize dashboards, report features including graphs and charts and key performance indicators (KPIs). Solutions that restrict access to all features on mobile devices will not serve your business users well.

‘The choice of a mobile BI solution is key to success. It must support both Android and iOS, and operate in a ‘design once, use anywhere’ approach that accommodates desktops, tablets, and smart phones with an intelligent, adaptive user interface (UI).’

It is important to understand that simply having mobile access is not enough. If the mobile BI solution is not flexible and seamless so that it operates on all devices; if it does not provide all features and functionality in a mobile environment, business users will be frustrated and are not likely to adopt and use the solution on a daily basis which will negatively impact return on investment (ROI).

Mobile BI and Business Intelligence solutions should include tools and techniques that make it easier to achieve data literacy and provide data analytics access to all business users. Simple, self-serve BI tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your goals with features and tools like Social BI, Embedded BI, etc.  Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.

Original Post : Mobile BI Ensures Access to Critical Data for Business Users!

3 Ways Cross-Tab BI Can Improve Reporting!

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June 16, 2022

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.

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Prepare for Success with the Right BI Tools!

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May 10, 2022

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!

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Leverage Key Performance Indicators to Achieve Results!

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April 12, 2022

Key Performance Indicators and Performance Management are Crucial to Business Agility!

When a business takes on the task of going from an opinion-based, guessing game environment to a metrics-based, fact-based environment, it must decide WHAT to measure. Metrics are fine, but deciding what is important to measure is crucial. You can measure the wrong things and end up knowing nothing about what is happening in your enterprise, and which tasks and activities are contributing to your bottom line, as opposed to the tasks that are non-productive and business processes that should be modified.

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Mobile BI Improves User Adoption and ROI!

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February 15, 2022

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.

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