In creating its new business analytics practice, Britehouse has acquired additional specialist skills and extended its solutions set to include the full spectrum of SAP analytics functionality.
The new unit also enables Britehouse to bring all its existing analytics talent under one roof, allowing for better collaboration and knowledge sharing, and therefore ensuring the resulting solutions are integrated and aligned.
"Business has no choice now but to move from a focus on business intelligence - using the data in transactional systems to improve operational and tactical capability - to business analytics, which is strategic and forward-looking," says Britehouse Analytics business unit manager, Charl du Buisson.
"Business analytics allows an organisation to go beyond effective day-to-day decision-making that maintains its market share into accurate planning that moves the company forward in ways that are relevant to all its stakeholders' objectives.
"For [MT1] organisations that are looking for sustainability, business analytics is the next logical step in their use of IT as a business enabler.
"In order to help organisations to move smoothly to analytics, we've fine-tuned our established business intelligence practice to incorporate the whole of SAP's best-of-breed analytics ecosystem.
"As a consequence, we can also help customers extract continuously better value from their transactional systems and from their investment in SAP."
Britehouse Analytics is SAP's only African partner to provide such a broad range of business analytics consultancy and also undertake implementations.
Britehouse Analytics' offering includes enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC), enterprise information management (EIM), and database and technology (D&T).
EPM enables organisations to close the gap between strategy and operational execution by cascading corporate goals down into department-appropriate metrics, ensuring accountability, enabling intuitive modelling, monitoring and analysis, and streamlining execution of strategy-guided financial and operational plans. The financial applications also ease the process of financial consolidation and reporting.
GRC solutions are designed to satisfy stakeholders' demand for effective governance, including enterprise risk management, transparency, accountability, and optimised performance. At the same time, globally integrated markets are imposing increasing volumes of regulations.
Implementing SAP-based solutions for GRC provides for the automation of GRC activities through best practices and a scalable enterprise platform. This in turn enables proactive prevention of risk events and compliance violations, allowing organisations to embed GRC programmes into strategy, improve productivity, and reduce cost.
EIM enables the delivery of integrated, accurate, and timely structured and unstructured data across the enterprise. It ensures the availability of trusted data for business transaction processing, business intelligence, data warehousing, advanced analytics, data migration, and master data management. It also addresses organisations' urgent need to integrate big data into the landscape for enhanced analytics.
Within Britehouse Analytics, D&T covers data warehousing and real-time reporting solutions based on SAP Business Warehouse, SAP HANA (side car or SAP BW on HANA), and SAP IQ (standalone or near line storage). D&T forms the platform from which to build the EPM, BI, and advanced analytics solutions.
Du Buisson says that, because predictive analytics is becoming a differentiator for its customers, Britehouse has made significant investments in acquiring and training top talent in the discipline.
"Many of our business analytics specialists have not come from a SAP background. They're steeped in the principles and practice of predicting markets and business models on which the SAP tools are based. They are also experts in their given area of business analytics. So they bring an objective perspective to the use of the SAP tools. They are therefore able to give our customers informed but impartial advice.
"Having now been trained on the SAP tools, they also know how to implement them to get the customer the outcomes that will best propel his organisation into its optimal future.
"At Britehouse, we always focus on providing the customer with a complete solution. In the case of business analytics, we're now ideally positioned to do just that."
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