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When the going gets tough, Business Intelligence could help make critical decisions
The global recession has had a diverse and ripple effect across nations and their economies. Hardly any company or sector is immune to this vicious slowdown and every business leader has been forced to react to the crisis, at some level. As credit tightens companies squeeze IT budgets and reduce investing in good business-enhancing technology. Recession is a good time though, to prioritize IT spending choices and lay the plans for future growth of your organization.
Careful stewardship over existing assets and frugality concerning new investments is good policy - in both weak and strong economic times. Reduced spending doesn't mean that IT has to stand still, but it will force a necessary examination of priorities.
To take advantage of these sluggish times, your company needs access to critical data about how well your business, your market, your competitors, and your suppliers are responding to today's challenging times. In positioning your organization to weather turbulent markets, insight and making informed, good decisions can be the critical factor that determines your success or failure, rather than depending on your instinct or guts. Most organizations are inundated with data, with more flooding in every day. This exacerbates an already difficult problem: how to manage data and extract meaningful information from it. Users typically find ways around this by generating extracts, massaging data in secondary tools, proliferating copies, and sometimes correcting the copy so it disagrees with the original. Ever-increasing regulatory pressures force retention for compliance purposes, so data deprecation becomes an important consideration that impacts storage requirements. Reducing the number of data sources and de-duplicating the data in those sources will lead to fewer errors, greater efficiency, and reduced maintenance costs. That is why it is important to understand how Business Intelligence can protect your company from the economic storm and have you emerging a winner.
Business intelligence (BI) is used to analyze and report on multiple data sources (both data at rest and in motion) to enhance business processes and inspire changes to the organization's business model. Effective BI should keep the organization from missing opportunities for business innovation. In the heightened competitive pressure that accompanies a constricting economy, BI is a wise investment. Make sure you know what you desire to know, however; otherwise, what appears to be great data mining may tell you nothing at all. BI makes business processes more efficient and information-management processes less complicated and these are some of the reasons it can play a crucial role in a weak economy.
Using Employee Metrics to Motivate Performance
One way to motivate positive performance is to make employees aware of how they compare to their peers / colleagues. This information could be put to use by employees to make better decisions and also encourages them to work harder to improve their standing in the organization. A BI system can automatically update a reporting database whenever designated revenue and trading milestones are reached. Additionally, using BI technology can help create several dynamic reports to motivate employee performance.
For example, the Top 5 Employees report reveals which employees are bringing in the most revenue; the Top 5 Branches ranking system encourages healthy competition among offices. These daily ranking systems, along with a cumulative Book of Records report, continually acquaint each trader, manager, and executive with the company's progress in this dynamic industry.
Using BI to Identify Cost-Saving Opportunities
One of the ways BI reduces costs is by shortening the time it takes for people to get the relevant information. A BI application shrinks the process of acquiring relevant information from weeks to minutes. As it refines the predictive analysis capabilities of the information gathered, the organization is better able to react to leading indicators before they impact the product margins.
Helping a Dealer Network Reduce Costs
BI technology can be applied to create a dealer reporting system that saves a few millions each year. The system identifies excessive repair costs by monitoring how much each dealer's warranty performance varies from the average performance of other dealers in the same geographic region. Helping dealers keep costs down and comply with regional averages contributes to the company's bottom line.
Using BI as a Profit Center
BI can also uncover previously untapped revenue. The genesis of these initiatives is often a desire to fully analyze data about customers, products, and sales. For example, the administration department of an IT company wants to figure out how and from which sector revenue is being generated for the company. To do its job more effectively, the company can create a programme that calculates revenue and yield from each of its branches, sorted by week and month.
Data visualization software uses geographic displays to reveal point-of-sale data on a world map. Linking interactive graphs makes it easier to detect correlations in the data. This leads to more productive meetings; better understanding of the issues, and more clearly defined follow-up activities.
It is the same data but it is interactive, so users can isolate a certain aspect of the data, drill-down, and spot problems in specified areas. This type of analysis is better than data mining because it allows users to drill down to the core of the issue, rather than simply run predefined algorithms from a data-mining program.
Many business leaders are looking to BI for near-term solutions, but BI delivers high-value returns on many levels. BI enables companies to work smarter, even when tight financial times mean smaller IT budgets and leaner staffs. Market-leading companies in every industry are turning to Business Intelligence solutions to stay ahead. When the economy turns-as it inevitably will-these are the firms that will be in the best position to seize the next wave of opportunities.
The author is Chairman, InfoBuild India and President, Amtex Systems and can be contacted at sunny@infobuild.in | 
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