Running a business is a difficult undertaking. Executives are under continual pressure to monitor and stay abreast of hundreds of metrics, including financial, environmental, human resources, technical and production-related information sources. As important, is their need to be able to trust the information they monitor, take decisions on it and act on their decisions to drive their businesses forward. Thus failure to, or the inability to, keep a close eye on the many factors that influence business performance could at best cost the business in terms of lost profits or missed opportunities, and at worst, contribute to business failure.
"To help alleviate this challenge of coping with information overload and increase the integrity of the information upon which executives act, cost-effective business intelligence (BI) software tools are readily available," says Andrew Connold, managing director of Synergy Computing.
"Information overload is a common management issue faced not only by large companies, but medium businesses too. There is no better way to capitalise on the wealth of information generated by the various systems within the typical business than to apply it to provide management insight into business operations which can be then actioned for business improvement or the maximisation of good performance in an existing initiative," he says.
Connold notes that Microsoft has significantly increased its penetration into the BI field by including free analytical and reporting tools with its SQL Server database product. "Added to this, a high percentage of small to medium businesses run almost entirely on Microsoft technologies, of which Excel provides a useful, cost-effective front-end to the Analysis Services data cubes. Thus existing business financial and other data can be leveraged to give company executives a depth of understanding of their businesses that was previously time-consuming and costly to acquire," he explains.
For those companies seeking to delve ever deeper into the potential value offered by their information stores, Connold says specialist BI tools are available to suit most budgets. "Whereas previously BI was a topic and a tool only for companies with big budgets, there are tools from the most simple Excel-powered analytics through to highly advanced predictive systems. Companies therefore have access to the ideal balance of expenditure versus functionality, and with professional assistance, can select a point of maximum value against cost," he says.
In smaller, focused BI implementations data can be extracted directly from the accounting system, or other database, for analysis and reporting at very low costs. For more complex BI implementations drawing larger quantities of data, often from multiple software systems, staging the data in a BI platform, or database, makes relevant data readily available to all users via whatever BI tools best suit the organisation's budget and requirements.
"As the usage of the BI implementation grows and needs change, companies can implement more advanced and specialist BI software tools to increase the benefit from their initial BI implementation," notes Connold.
For the majority of operational BI needs, no additional investment is required other than the effort required to leverage the capabilities of native Microsoft functionality. "At the operational level, there is a ready solution for the executive who has a common data platform - Microsoft - and wants a cost-effective means of readily accessing, analysing and reporting from the business information upon which he has to act. That's something most businesses are able to achieve very quickly," he concludes.
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