Today, in the information era with growing globalisation, organisations increasingly have to cope with a host of challenges like rapid changes in technology, fluctuating customer behaviour, and shrinking product lifecycles. Together with increasing volumes of data and information; interpreting and managing enterprise-wide information is crucial to make well-informed timely decisions, respond to ever-changing environment and stay ahead of the competition.

In such a dynamic scenario, effective Business Intelligence solutions and Corporate Performance Management solutions help organisations consolidate and drain streamlined quality information and provide them with strong analytical, enterprise reporting and business intelligence alert mechanisms to manage core strategies and improve corporate performance management through Business Balanced Scorecards, which help align individual performances to the key strategies to improve estimation and predictability of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Key Performance Metrics.

What is needed is the delivery of personalised business intelligence into the hands of CXOs, business executives and operations managers, who can leverage it for maximum business benefit in key business areas of:

We have presented a business scenario to help you better understand the context of how business intelligence can help you answer questions that help leverage business intelligence to manage growing business.

Brand Development Strategy

• How do we advance the brand into the top 10 in terms of market share?

As an objective, the management may decide that they wish to increase the number of clients across all market sectors by 10%, year on year over a five year period. Specific initiatives may be to offer products on loss basis to the first 5 new clients in each market sector.

Business Intelligence Reporting can identify which market sectors are proving to be difficult, and therefore need a new marketing approach.

Financial Strategy

• How can we reduce our overheads?

An example of an objective may be to improve the reliability of a given product to a specific threshold, perhaps 80%. A specific initiative to achieve the objective might be to identify components which fail to meet a minimum threshold of failures within warranty. Components which consistently fail to meet the threshold would be candidates for further analysis; perhaps resulting in new suppliers being sourced.

Business intelligence software can assist by maintaining trends and exception reports, automatically notifying managers where components fail to meet minimum standards.

One-off Analysis

• What percentage of turnover is generated through new clients gained in the same financial year over the last three years?

The business needs to analyse and provide required information to the stakeholders.

A consistent view of correlated information from different information systems along with effective business analytics can assist in presenting this information quickly and accurately.

Client Management

• How can we reduce churn in our client base?

The business maybe experiencing an unacceptable level of customer attrition, and you wish to define an objective of reducing the number of customers who discontinue placing orders by 20% over a 12 month period.

One initiative the business may take would be to introduce incentives where a customer maintains a given number of product orders business intelligence can assist in maintaining reports of how well the initiative is working, on a regional basis.

Supplier Management

• How can we reduce delays in the supply chain?

Management may perceive that lines of supply have deteriorated, and wish to manage supply more effectively. An objective of reducing delivery delays due to suppliers by 25% over the next 12 months is set, and an initiative of finding two additional backup component suppliers for key products.

A business intelligence tool can assist in maintaining a scorecard updated monthly, and showing the number of deliveries delayed by more than a given number of days due to third parties.

Sales Expenditure Analysis

• Is our building project staying on budget?

A company wishes to monitor capital expenditure during a project to build substantial amount of additional car parking space. They need to be able to capture and report upon progress during the project, through a number of milestones, and report upon progress, tracking costs against budgets, and where savings have been realised.

A business intelligence system can assist in acting as a collection tool, with the project dates being updated from emailed forms, and by extracting financial outlays from a financial database.

Distribution Analysis

• How can we optimise the deployment of our appliances?

A public services organisation wish to manage their distribution appliances across throughout the region.

A business intelligence solution can assist in reporting on the frequency of appliance call-outs, and report on the number of appliances in attendance, on a geographic co-ordinates basis.

Campaign Management

• How effective is our TV advertising campaign?

A company need to be able to track the performance of their sales operations across the country, during a major TV advertising campaign. They need to be able to track new sales by region, outlet and by salesperson.

A business intelligence software can provide insights into which regions are performing well, and which salespeople are achieving their targets.

Periodic Sales Performance

• How well are our customer services teams handling the periodic increases in support requests?

A company wishes to ensure that the number of services employees, and their levels of product knowledge, is sufficient to handling potential increases in the volumes of calls. A business intelligence tool is needed to report on the types and volumes of calls handled by team and by first and second level support, including the average call lengths and average call queue lengths.

One-off Analysis

• What percentage of our turnover is generated through new clients gained in the same financial year, over the last three years?

The business may be facing a friendly takeover bid and is required to provide information to the prospective buyer.

A business intelligence system can assist in presenting this information quickly and accurately.

Project Planning

• How can I monitor progress of the project to be able to put together additional requirements?

A growing business wishes to monitor capital expenditure during their new project expansion to build substantial additional project requirements. They need to be able to capture and report upon progress during the project, through a number of milestones, and report upon progress, tracking costs against budgets, and where savings have been realised.

A Business intelligence soultion can assist in acting as a collection tool, with the project dates being updated from emailed forms, and by extracting financial outlays from a financial database.

Sales & Distribution

• What is the prospective sales of the product in newer customer regions?

A Business intelligence tool can assist in acting as a collection tool, with the project dates being updated from emailed forms, and by extracting financial outlays from a financial database.

For every distinct business operating in different industries and business function, effective Business intelligence solutions provide improved visibility and access to fast, consistent and reliable information at all the three different levels in the enterprise- strategic, tactical and operational levels for effective performance management. That’s the power of Business Intelligence that delivers key decision makers and business users the right information, in the right format, at the right time.