Cape Town, 26 Oct 2015
Neil van Wyngaard, SharePoint/BI Lead Consultant at EOH MC, says South Africa's large enterprises are seeking more insight into their operations and systems in a bid to improve productivity, cut costs and make proactive business decisions.
"To get this deep business insight, they typically embark on major business intelligence (BI) projects in which all the data within the company must be aggregated before it becomes possible to assess what data is available, and what questions can be asked. This can take years to achieve. But business needs answers now," he says.
In contrast, business could be achieving actionable business insights almost immediately by leveraging the features within SharePoint, says Van Wyngaard.
"Most large enterprises are using SharePoint, but most tend to see it as a glorified intranet or document storage solution. They are not really aware of SharePoint's BI features, which include tools such as Excel Service, SQL Reporting Services, Power Pivot and Power View. By utilising these tools, enterprises immediately gain the ability to interrogate and share data to address operational issues," he says.
Van Wyngaard and his team are helping large clients in SA's coastal areas to leverage these tools to see immediate business benefits. "Once you show one department how relatively easy it is to leverage the BI functionality within SharePoint, they get so excited they rush around showing all their colleagues. It goes viral and every department wants the same benefits," he says.
Major EOH MC Solutions clients such as Old Mutual, Virgin Active, Mpact (formerly Mondi Packaging) and Stellenbosch University are pioneering the use of SharePoint BI functionality in South Africa, and seeing measurable benefits.
"At EOH MC, we recommend that enterprises do not take the traditional 'BI big bang approach', and instead take a 'federated BI approach', whereby each department harnesses SharePoint-powered BI to answer its own business questions first. Then, once all the departmental data marts have been set up, they can be aggregated into a big data platform. In this way, immediate business gains are achieved and only the relevant data is aggregated at the end," he says.
With immediate visibility into operations, enterprises might determine how productive and efficient certain areas of the business are, where delays occur, and where proactive steps can address potential problem areas. "Depending on the industry and the data available, enterprises might want to know how long a product takes from manufacture to delivery, for example, and identify areas of the supply chain that can be streamlined. By automating the BI process and making it readily accessible and easy to use, business gains a dashboard that delivers insights into the entire supply chain, and can readily identify areas for improvement," says Van Wyngaard.
This ability to streamline processes and take proactive measures to avoid delays and problems enables companies to measurably improve efficiencies, he says. And this, in turn, frees up resources and enables the enterprise to generate more revenues.