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Intelligence for your Enterprise

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PCQ Bureau
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An enterprise collects enormous amount of data from various verticals like

sales, marketing, inventory, service, etc. The question is, why do you want to

take and secure this historical data? Obvious reason being that historical data

helps you make better decisions in the current scenario. The historical data

could be in the form of charts, spreadsheets, graphs-to sum it up a sort of

decision history which tells about the kind of decisions taken in the past. Each

and every decision taken by the management at any point of time is clearly

marked on the data in terms of negative or positive outcome.

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For example, whenever there is any change in marketing strategy of any

company, the sales are affected. Either they rise or they fall, stating market

reaction for changed decision. Every organization takes decisions based on their

best logical approach by using every possible resource like market survey, past

project reports, and historical data. Despite using the best possible resources,

some of these decisions turn out to be a failure. The reason being the

non-utilization of future analysis. That is where Business Intelligence (BI)

comes to play.

BI is one technology which is worth implementing for each enterprise. You

surely want your decisions to be more accurate and precise. Right. We'll tell

you exactly how to go about it. Earlier BI has been looked upon as an enterprise

solution that can manipulate historical data into a more presentable form,

merely to take decisions based on past results. But that's not what BI is all

about.

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It arms you with the power to visualize future growth and help you take

better decisions based on logical and analytical reasons, calculated and made

ready for you by the BI suite. All enterprises perform according to their

management capabilities. Similarly, each BI suite provides capabilities

according to its defined structure.

Now, the question arises, as to whether an organization really needs to have

a BI solution? The answer is yes. Not only to help in present decisions but also

in your future and long term decisions.

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What makes it 'happening'



The BI market is on a growth curve as far as India is concerned. From large
enterprises with existing ERP, SCM, and similar implementations to SMBs that are

ready to improve their IT infrastructure, the scope for BI implementations lies

wide open. The growing potential for BI can be attributed to the reason that

many organizations that already have systems in place to collect data and gather

information, many a times find themselves in a situation where they have no

tools or roadmaps to put the vast data and information into use for strategic

decision making.

For example, an organization might generate reports out of the existing CRM

or ERP solution. But there would be a lot of man hours required if it wanted to

analyze both these reports in perspective. It's places like this where BI

based solutions come into play. Databases at best concentrate on collecting

data; and storing and optimizing it to get information. But with increasing need

for organizations to adapt quickly to changes and the voluminous information

they collect, the information collector needs more than just properly defined

and laid out data.

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For a quick analysis of such complexity one has to go for BI based solutions.

The potential customers for vendor products include organizations across various

verticals. Most of the pharmaceutical houses have already gone for BI products

and are harnessing the positives of BI solutions already for OLAP, ETL, or even

information management. But there is still a lot of scope in other segments such

as production houses, retailing, and even in the public sector as systems such

as warehouses are yet to be harnessed by many companies in this part of the

world.

Benefits



The very first thing that must be made clear is that BI will not happen on its
own. It will perform as good as it has been configured. True benefits will be

obtained only when a skilled and analytically sound employee has structured the

overall process according to the management needs. Similarly you need to have

proper constructing team that will understand and change the implemented

structure and structural process according to changed market propositions and

companies' current policies and strategies.

BI will give you edge to make better decisions more efficiently. There are

different scenarios where BI can make a potential mark, as in case of production

you can have all the relevant data that will be able to show you the correct

production of each and every inventory item not only in terms of time but also

about each production belt and batch.

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If you talk of sales then you will be able to see through the facts of

figures the current market shifts and along with that you can easily visualize

the future prospect of any business and process according to not only its

present rating but also accounting market trend. You would be able to forecast

the demand or stocks that will arise in any period of time depending upon the

season, buyer and customer behavior.

The advantages of using a BI solution are: easy data representation; complete

start to end logistic data information, much better than that from reporting

obtained by knowledge management; and management information systems. You will

be able to seamlessly integrate various dimensions such as customer, product,

employee, etc. to discover information that was not possible earlier. It lets

you have access to database analysis instantly, to view which product, market,

customers and employees are showing growth prospects, so that you can focus your

energy on them, and which ones have been slowing down, so that you can address

the situation before it gets out of hand.

Implementing BI increases collaborative work among the various departments

for better work efficiency and productivity as all databases are linked, hence

each minor or major change to a database reflects across every department and

the company's entire structure.

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This in turn leads to a transparent work flow and smoother processes through

increased collaboration. BI can also cause reduction in time taken by any

enquiry or report due to various access and check points in the organization

providing improved business planning and decision making for each short, middle

and long term scenarios. After better analysis and understanding of the market,

organizations will see increase in sales and profits. It will be easier for an

organization to actually reduce overall costs and expenditure. It also enhances

your customer support and services, which in turn provides better sales and

customer support. Organizations will also be able to predict the nature and

behavior of the market according to the present market strategies and decisions.

Sectors such as Pharmaceutical, IT/Telecom, etc have starting using BI

solutions. In addition to utilizing an ERP or a CRM solution, BI further

enhances your information reservoir for better productivity.

Preview



In this series we will take you through the most prevalent BI implementations in
each of the following parts. We look into implementations of Data warehouse,

OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing), ETL (extract, transform and load), Data

Mining, dashboards, reporting and web based analytics. We take a sneak peek into

all of these before we get into thick of things in the succeeding parts. A Data

warehouse is a repository of data structured in a way so as to provide

comprehensive details of all the aspects important to the organization's

information user. These aspects can be customers, vendors, business processes,

or even transactions. The data is provided with a time dimension in view, and

also with some volatility.



Data warehouses are quite often constructed by combining Data Marts in a
particular architecture. These data marts that form the units of a warehouse,

contain a subset of the data of the warehouse and each of them serves as the

repository for a particular set of users, or community, or even a process within

an organization. A Data Warehouse forms the first part of most of the BI

solutions that are implemented, and organization now even looks at the warehouse

in conjunction with existing data collection sources such as ERP. The process

defined for building a warehouse requires a thorough analysis of the

organization and its processes as each of the marts being implemented in the

warehouse target a specific subset of data as aforesaid.

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ETL refers to the methods involved in accessing and manipulating source data

and loading it into target database. An ETL process takes care of the fact that

the data reaches the warehouse in a state that has been defined for the

warehouse. An ETL process starts with mapping the data between the source system

(that can be an application, a file, database, or any data collection source for

which the warehouse is conceived), and the target warehouse or mart. The

mappings we referred to over here are definitions of the relationships and the

data flow between source and target systems and objects.

What follows next is 'Cleansing' the data in a staging area, ie an area

where data is processed before it enters the warehouse. Cleansing of data refers

to removing anomalies in the data with respect to a warehouse. Data mining forms

one of the most critical processes that run on a warehouse. It is defined as the

extraction of information that can be trivial, or even previously unknown. The

process is also popularly known as 'Knowledge Discovery'. Mining involves

usage of, statistical and visualization techniques for discovery of information

and presenting knowledge in a form which is easily comprehensible to humans.

One of the most common implementations of a BI solution is an OLAP (On Line

Analytical Processing). It is one term that lacks a standard one size fits all

procedure of implementation. In fact its definition is also something that

varies depending on the vendor's providing tools for it.

In a nutshell, OLAP can be defined as a process that provides analysis of

structured and multi-dimensional data in quick time. If there is one word that

characterizes OALP precisely it is 'Multi Dimensional'. Querying on tables

usually involves working with a two dimensional flat structure which databases

call 'table.' OLAP on the other hand is far more complicated than that.

Typically in OLAP we optimize the tables into one of the schemas that we'll

define in detail in later parts, and then analyze the structure to define

multiple 'Dimensions' over which the tables will be queried. These

dimensions are nothing but those variables, in whose relation, we need to find

out information. For example for an OLAP implementation that uses tables from

sales department for an organization, the dimensions defined could be

Salesperson, Product, Sales Region, Distributors, or even a particular city and

most importantly a time unit.

Dashboards have caught up as one of the important sources for decision

analysis and they completely depend on accurate visual modeling. They help an

organization to go beyond usage of spreadsheets in the sense that they get an

interface that is a single point of entry from which all relevant information

can be viewed, interpreted and acted upon. Though spreadsheets are very easy to

deploy and provide a dashboard type of functionality, they mostly generate

static reports.

This is where dashboards score over spreadsheets as they provide you a visual

model which is highly interactive, and can provide relevant information as per

the specific needs of a particular information user. Dashboards typically track

performance or decisions or similar actions that are the KPIs (Key Performance

Indicators) for an organization. These KPIs are similar to the variables we

talked about while previewing OLAP. In fact the Dimensions used over there are

almost always the KPIs.

Web-based analytics is a fairly new concept, not that it has not culminated

into implementations, but it's still pretty early days for this concept. As

the name suggests it delivers standard analytics of data to the user over a Web

browser using Web technologies. Web-based analytics, unlike other technologies,

we described earlier can offer both the internal and external users the ability

to analyze data specific to their particular needs.



The analyzed data is then used to create graphics to display the results as
needed from associates to senior executives to sales and marketing guys. For

example, sales representatives can analyze customer purchases generated through

normal sales channels. This information can be analyzed, graphically displayed

and sent on to product managers, manufacturing personnel and senior executives

who can then make real time decisions as needed.

What's available?



There is a wide range of products available for BI implementations which
includes some of the big names in the game. To start with we have SAS, which

have their own BI platform, and also Enterprise Intelligence platform which

includes Integration, analytics and storage tools. SAP also provides BI

solutions based on AG platform and Netweaver. IBM also has a comprehensive range

of products and tools for BI. The DB2 database has a Data Warehouse Edition that

also allows you to define warehousing processes.

IBM also provides Cube Views, their tool for building cubes for OLAP and also

a tool for aiding Web based analytics, called Web Services for Cube Views.

Microsoft has integrated BI capabilities in MS SQL Server itself. The MS SQL

Analytics Services, and the Visual Studio Team Foundation System also includes

features for BI solutions development. Among these is Pentaho, an Open Source

initiative that provides a detailed set of tools and a BI suite as well. Their

tools include a complete BI suite, a Design Studio, and a Reporting Wizard.

Cognos offers business application tools available under Cognos8 BI. It has

architecture for reporting, analysis, scoreboard, dashboards, business event

management and Data Integration. Oracle has a BI suite to cater to corporate

performance management system to assist you in making analytic and tactical

decisions. Suite includes performance management, interactive dashboards and of

course the analytics. It supports ad hoc query, analysis, alerts, reporting and

predictive analysis. A medium order BI solution is MicroStrategy8. Business

Objects has a couple of applications for businesses. These are catagorized under

a BI platform that has business object enterprise, integration kit to integrate

with PeopleSoft, portal integration kits, SAP, Seibel, etc, and analytic

engines.

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