Iteration2

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Iteration2 Business Intelligence

"The purpose of Business Intelligence is not simply to answer common questions, but to  uncover new questions and the answers to the questions you would never of thought to ask"

OVERVIEW

In a competitive environment, you need your company’s business systems to deliver information fast. You want to know what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, and you want to be able to find out why. You want up-to-date performance metrics, financial ratios, profit and loss summaries, and other types of information that roll up across all departments, products, and geographies. And you want the information to be based on the business you did around the world today—not last quarter or last month or even last week. Business Intelligence and data visualization software lets managers in any size organization get continuous, current information about their business and use this information to make better decisions and move rapidly in response to changes. And all of this data is available in an executive dashboard.

INTRODUCTION

In challenging economic times, companies must make decisions quickly based on timely analysis of accurate data. Until now, it has been impossible for organizations to provide management with a complete summary of business activities every day. They may have application software only to find that they are still not be able to collect, let alone effectively distribute, the information that’s critical to keeping a business running. They adopt best-of-breed applications that automate only bits and pieces of their processes, and so marketing remains disconnected from sales, sales remains disconnected from finance, ... Multiple systems trap information inside silos, making it nearly impossible to collaborate and access information across business units and geographies. Companies leverage the internet to connect all their business processes and centralize data in a single global source. A single definition of employees, customers, suppliers—run globally, so that all of your customers, your employees—everyone, worldwide—are in a single database.

FRAGMENTED INFORMATION

Fragmented information, created by different, disconnected systems in marketing, sales, service, and other organizations, and different systems in geographic locations. All the silos of information need to be consolidated to reveal an accurate picture of business events. Data warehouses are critical for long-term analytics, but not for providing continuous, real-time data on critical business metrics.

INCOMPLETE AUTOMATION

Caused by using software packages that automate only part of a business process. Specialized systems, such as those that come from best-of-breed vendors, don’t cover entire business flows, such as point of sale through delivery. The result? Disconnected systems that may leave businesses with analytic capabilities at only a departmental level, not across an entire business process, nor the entire enterprise. In either scenario, it’s impossible to get a complete snapshot of the business in real time. Decision makers don’t have information, they have pieces of a puzzle, leaving them unable to answer simple questions about their businesses, such as "How many quotes turn into orders?" or "How many contracts are outstanding?" An integrated application is designed from the start to work together. The application shares the same model for information and automates business processes across an enterprise so that every organization is up to date, all the time.

UNIFIED INFORMATION, COMPLETE AUTOMATION

Integrated systems are designed to automate all common business functions within an organization. It is the industry’s first and only set of applications integrated around a single unified data model. Good business intelligence runs in one global instance of a single database. All the applications work together and share the same information, so organizations don't have to worry about software interfacing, data translation, or integration to get to the information they need to keep running.

CONNECTING THE ENTERPRISE

Enterprise-wide IT connects and automates the entire flow of business processes across both front and back office operations—worldwide—streamlining every area, including marketing, sales, service, contracts, order management, product design, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, financials, projects, human resources, and professional services automation. The result is a complete application that automates key business flows like Campaign-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay. This provides the Business Intelligence summarized and displayed in personalized portals, viewable by line of business, geography, department, or product.

COMMON DATA MODEL

A common data model provides a single definition of customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and business events. This single source of truth, throughout the organization, means that the information customers use to make decisions is accurate and timely. Accessible by anyone, with any device: Business Intelligence systems provide C-level executives, line-of-business managers, and warehouse workers. Business Intelligence sends exactly the information our customers need into these portals, when they need it, continuously. These portals are delivered in ways that best support an individual user—for example, email for executives or Mobile Devices for mobile workers.

Modern Business Intelligence systems avoid the traditional data warehousing events of Extraction, Translation, and Loading for daily and weekly summaries. Instead, they provides management summaries directly from the transaction data, saving many costly and time-consuming steps. In the case of other vendors, the information such systems contain must be extracted from multiple warehouses, consolidated with that of other divisions, and loaded into a separate system for viewing and analysis. Those extra steps cause unnecessary and costly delays in reporting cycles. Further, what most other vendors deliver is basic reporting on transactional information. So they can report on what happened last quarter or last month, but not within any analytical context, such as on a historical or projected basis.

CONCLUSION

The rate at which a business converts transactional data into information is frequently the key to its competitive standing. To get the information they need, fast, companies need to seamlessly connect all their business processes, and store all their information in as few databases as possible—one being the ideal. Modern Business Intelligence systems are built on a single architecture, the single and complete data model ensures that you get better information out of your system and also benefit from consistent, accurate, and enterprise data.

Q4bis, Inc. has gained a reputation for their excellence in developing and providing easy to use business intelligence solutions for companies in a variety of industries around the world. With over 20 years experience in Business Intelligence, Q4bis.Inc and PST Software have developed the Q4bis BI Solutions with its own unique rapid implementation methodology (RIM) and proof of concept (POC). These methodologies developed by Q4bis, Inc. and PST Software along with their expertise in BI provide companies with a successful first time implementation and provides companies with outstanding ROI on their BI investment.