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Life After BI: The Next Big Thing

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PCQ Bureau
New Update


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Single view representation and analysis of enterprise data adds an additional thrust to smart decisions. Through the dial gauges, bulbs, charts, etc in dashboards, CEOs gets the overall view of their business. Through financial consolidation, CFOs get the variance to plan. And most of the business managers get their self-serve multi-dimensional reports.

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Sometimes when sales suddenly drops, costs rises or two competitors merge; very quickly they can respond to keep the company on track. Here BI helps in stakeholder's efforts to increase companies' growth, constrain costs and improve the bottom line. KPI helps review a company's current performance, examine its past business and forecast future trends.

Organizations get accurate and detailed picture of what is going on in terms of business and customers. It shall do this in different ways --accurate view of cost liabilities risks, customer buying patterns, supplier cost-effectiveness, etc. Following would be some of the benefits derived from BI.

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Governance and compliance, which require transparent, accurate financial reporting, have placed tremendous pressure on companies to take an enterprise-wide approach to ensuring timely, accurate and consistent data. No longer does the scattered data and reporting hampers compliance with regulatory and industry initiatives.

Many companies have not been able to truly take advantage or leverage investments of the data in ERP/CRM/SCM systems. Now with BI, there is sure shot delivery of timely, accurate reports related to the business processes these systems manage. These systems are no longer data prisons that are unable to share useful information for managing the enterprise. Creating piecemeal reports is not the answer.

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Business users focus on what they do best, analyzing and acting on information to help improve performance. They no longer spend their time searching for data, reconciling the data from various systems and debating whose numbers is correct.

BI helps pull together information from all internal organizations, which shows where the costs are, what they are, and provides a framework for making cost cutting decisions. Once the cost cutting is complete, organization views exactly what has been done and detail the impact in real-time.

Critical questions such as, why market shares are going to competitors; which products contribute the most to profit; how can business become more profitable; why some divisions are not profitable; which plants produce at the lowest cost; how can productivity improve; which parts of the world are the most profitable; who are the best and the worst customers; where is money being lost or made, etc are now answered.

With BI, organizations produce the right information at the right time, which is key for the success of any business enterprise.

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