2. What is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence (BI) is the practice of supporting decision making through the presentation and analysis of data. BI supports analytical processes such as: customer segmentation, product mix analysis, budgeting, and operations improvements. Techniques and tools associated with BI including data mining, dashboards, statistical analysis and regression modelling
28. Innovation and Continuous Improvement Experience The 3fifteen BI team is structured in a manner where all staff is assigned a mentor who is responsible for the continuous improvement of the technical capability of each resource. We have set best practice and standards for our technical staff which governs the way development takes place. The best practice and standards are continually reviewed and improved based on lessons learned from projects as well as new technology features and versions as they are released. Innovation
Business Intelligence serves to address business questions, through the careful analysis and presentation of data. Typical questions that are addressed by Business Intelligence are:What makes the most money within the organisation?How can money be saved in the organisation?Which areas in your business are growing the fastest?How do you share information about customers?How do you grow your customer base (breadth) and how do you mine existing customers (depth)?How do you manage your internal processes?
Important and significant investment has been made by both governments and corporates alike in implementing their corporate systems – to help save time and or money and to streamline business processes. While a single ERP is the vision the reality is that companies are holding important company information in a variety of systems. These include ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SCM (Supply Chain Management), HR (Human Resources), POS (Point of Sale) and others.Having a multitude of systems poses many challenges. Perhaps the systems themselves have poor reporting, and it’s hard to extract data. Or you might want to combine and analyze data from multiple systems. Many companies live with very manual, time consuming reporting processes. Or analysis is too difficult and is kept to a minimum.We are also living through an explosion in the quantity of digital information. As companies, we all face challenges in storing, accessing and managing an ever-increasing amount of data. It is a challenge to ensure that people don’t have to wade through enormous quantities of data to find what’s relevant. “Can you see the forest for the trees?” Having so much data can make it difficult to spot patterns, trends and opportunities. This line refers to the situation many people find themselves in, where they are bogged down in the details of raw transactional data, or in manual processes to try and report on this data, and they can’t lift their head up to see the big picture.Real value comes when organizations have the ability to extract corporate information, analyze their performance and see where they have opportunities to drive corporate performance. This is where business intelligence (BI) has an important role to play. There are many drivers for organizations to take up business intelligence. Just a few of them: Being able to compete more effectively in a changing world. We live in a world of constant change. Globalization, the credit crisis, the demands of GenY for transparency, feedback and empowerment in the workplace… Companies use analytics to ensure they have an accurate view of the business and that decisions can be made on facts, to identify market opportunities or unacceptable costs, and to communicate performance expectations and ensure they are monitored and measured throughout the organization.To reduce the time and effectiveness of internal reporting and analysis on corporate systems, for example minimizing month-end reporting times.There is a risk to corporate governance posed by unsecured spreadsheets and organizations want to minimize this risk and ensure that reporting and analysis are done in a centralized environment.We can’t stay on top of change and remain competitive unless we are constantly analyzing what is happening around us. Indeed, most industry analysts have touted BI to be the number one issue facing organizations today.BI is being used to drive efficiency in the business: improving processes, getting to customers, retaining customers, being innovative and creating new products and services. BI is used to achieve competitive advantage
Traditionally BI projects are difficult to justify to business users as the tangible benefits of an enterprise BI implementation, namely the reporting, dashboards and self-service components, are only delivered after the enterprise data warehouse has been developed. Typically 80% of the project time is taken up in the development of the enterprise data warehouse which means that 80% of the project cost would have been spent by business before seeing the valueAt 3fifteen we recognise the imperative of delivering tangible benefits to business sooner. We have therefore developed a methodology that provides these tangible benefits early in the project. By creating three project processes, Qwk-win, Data warehouse and Presentation, we are able to provide a waterfall approach to implementing a BI project, which allows for the creation of reports, dashboards, and self-service BI within a short timeframe from the start of the project. In typical deployments the business value can be realised at the end of the first month of the project
Business value graphMaintenance, why we are specialist in maintaining it.Return on Investment
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Continues
All members of the team are incentivised around continues learning and development. Staff KPI’s include measurements around writing certification exams, and presenting knowledge sharing sessions back to the entire team. This ensures that all innovations and new knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout the team, which in turn improves the base knowledge of the division, keeping all staff current on technology and new ideas.
