16 Nov
The problem with specialized business intelligence software is that it stands like an airplane – and is only needed when you have a large, large company with the appropriate amount of data at your side. In general, now there are not so many specialists on the market who have tested such systems, have experience working with them and can plainly say what it is, why it is needed and what it will give after implementation.
The problem with specialized business intelligence software is that it stands like an airplane – and is only needed when you have a large, large company with the appropriate amount of data at your side. In general, now there are not so many specialists on the market who have tested such systems, have experience working with them and can plainly say what it is, why it is needed and what it will give after implementation.
The first and main application of business intelligence is to be able to build arbitrary reports head-on while heads of departments or members of the board of directors are conferring. One of my favorite examples is from which plant to supply vodka to stores: from a distant one (expensive logistics and 2 weeks on the road), but cheap in terms of production cost, or from the nearest (1 day), but expensive?
It is clear that you can dig deeper and answer in a week. But more often you need faster modeling and not hundreds of disparate reports, but a unified environment where a financial specialist can simply take and receive the necessary data without involving the entire IT department. There are also specific tasks that these and related systems solve.
We are not talking about specific solutions, but about what an enterprise can get from the implementation of Business Intelligence and related systems. It is clear that when data begins to be collected and analyzed, it is logical to use it in many places. The first main question is data collection, the second is the methodology of what to do with this data in general. Let’s start to figure it out.
The first is the preparation of reports. Everything is quite simple here: BI acts as a single data repository for all subsystems and knows how to combine them, process them in dependencies and produce results.
The second task is to process data and cut regular reports for all divisions of the company. From the most unusual thing – we used a BI system in order to receive data from population censuses, toss them, supplement, restore, build hypotheses, check, process and cut thousands of reports for all regions, cities and villages.
The third challenge is to speed up processing. Previously, the report was made once a month, and now in real time (this is a very, very critical difference for many areas of business).
