By Bob Stein, KSS Inc.

Professional, reliable and easy to use Business Intelligence (BI) is essential to maintaining an edge and meeting financial performance objectives in the increasingly competitive convenience store retailing industry. The amount of change in the economy today, which can affect consumer confidence and behavior on an immediate basis, requires agile responses based on insights provided from valuable business data. Volatility in fuel prices, the stock market, retailer sales results and rising unemployment all make it necessary to be knowledgeable and dynamic in making decisions and changes in the business. To do so requires good data that is well organized and provides actionable insights: this is what Business Intelligence tools can do for retailers.

Characteristics of robust BI tools include the ability to efficiently compile data and report key performance indicators in an easy-to-understand visual/graphic “dashboard” that provides visual context of a company’s performance. For small and large retailers alike, BI offers an array of benefits that can improve a business owner’s decision making and increase profitability.

The “dashboard” interface of today’s BI solutions start with a daily snapshot of a convenience store operator’s business, placing data at its fingertips and allowing it to drill down from the dashboard to retrieve more details. Users can instantly compare today’s information against either budget or performance from previous months, quarters or years. Thus, the system gives store operators the tools needed to efficiently react to changing market conditions and make quick, competitive business decisions.

Users no longer have to spend countless hours sifting through multiple reports and data, because the BI software pulls all the available data as needed and consolidates information from various sources in different places, to immediately provide details about the business. BI quickly delivers information that in the past may have taken hours or even days to track down and compile.

The best business intelligence solutions identify both problems and opportunities for a convenience store business. BI can help retailers decide where to devote their resources and what operational trends they can exploit. The information helps users quickly respond to problem areas and improve store performance. Most importantly, the BI solution empowers convenience store operators to make decisions that can help affect their business in the most positive way, and ultimately gives them the data needed to gain a competitive advantage. The advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions means that even the smallest companies can obtain complete BI functionality and benefits.

Fortunately, even for small chains and single-store operators, access to quality BI is not out of reach. Traditionally, organizations had to either build or buy expensive systems to obtain BI power and knowledge. Today, Business Intelligence is no longer about massive, complex databases that require large staffs and larger IT budgets to maintain. Many tools can operate on small servers and interface with existing data warehouses to create decision support tools. This is inexpensive and fast.

With the SaaS model, the BI software and corresponding data are hosted by a technology vendor. Users, from independent retailers to large chains, pay a monthly subscription fee to access the power of BI — essentially renting the software and only paying for what they use.

Because users share the technology, vendor’s software and staff, this reduces upfront investments on servers and infrastructure, and eliminates the need for an IT staff to maintain and update the database. This does not mean, however, that a company’s information can be easily accessed and compromised. Advanced security features ensure complete confidentiality with this hosted model. The result is a BI solution — available today — that is faster, simpler, visually appealing, intuitive and best of all, more affordable than traditional solutions.

Hosted SaaS models not only benefit small retailers who lack the IT staff and resources to build, buy and support intricate BI software systems, but large organizations can also benefit by morphing their very complicated and involved systems into a much more simplified solution. The SaaS solutions available today make integrating BI into an organization very easy, regardless of size or budget.

With business more volatile and competitive than ever, BI is no longer a “nice to have,” it is now a necessary tool that enables retailers to stay at the forefront of their business by giving them access to the business data they need to make timely decisions and remain competitive. BI is a trend that is rapidly growing, and businesses today that don’t make use of it will be at an extreme disadvantage in a very short time.

The innovative, affordable BI tools available today are becoming more ubiquitous throughout the convenience store industry. These solutions are helping retailers of all sizes better understand their business and make optimal decisions that will ensure business success in the future and keep the convenience store industry healthy and prosperous.

I have released another Dashboard widget for Mac users that displays my blog’s feed!

You can download it in the Box.net widget.

-Mac Storm

I got another chance to go flying again last night! My friend David took me up, it was a lot of fun!

I shot some cool night shots while we were out!

Board members from two different nonprofits called me to express concern and surprise after learning in recent board meetings that their organizations were in financial distress or even crisis.  Both indicated that while they were seeing regular financial statements, they were not seeing anything that related to cash flow.  Both attributed the distress to overestimating foundation revenue.  They each indicated that the boards were surprised by this news!

Boards should not be surprised by the financial status of the organization.  The full board (not the Finance Committee, the Treasurer or the chief executive) is responsible for the financial statements and the financial viability of the organization.  So what can boards do to ensure that they are not surprised?  At BVU, we work with hundreds of boards each year, and find the following to be useful:

1. Establish a strong Finance Committee – Recruit more than one person with the relevant skills and expertise to work with staff to develop a realistic budget and financial forecasts at regular intervals (Quarterly? Monthly? Weekly?).  Ensure that the board’s financial reports are useful for forecasting and decision making.
2. Develop a one-page dashboard – Identify the key measures that board (and staff) must monitor on a regular basis to ensure that the organization is making progress towards financial, fundraising and programmatic goals.  For each category, track progress against budget-to-date and compare with numbers from the previous year.  Focus on key variances.  This is an excellent tool to help boards provide accountability, plan and make decisions, but it does not replace the need to provide financial statements to the board.
3. Create a culture of transparency and accountability – Share the financial forecast and the dashboard with the full board at each meeting.  Discuss options, priorities and realistic strategies for board and staff to help raise funds or reset the budget.  Access to this information should not be limited to the Finance Committee or the Treasurer.  The chief executive should feel comfortable that the board is a partner in addressing challenging financial issues.
4. Use meeting time to focus on important issues – View board and committee meetings as precious time where the organization’s board can focus on the issues that matter most.  Don’t waste time on details or reports that board members can read in advance or see in the dashboard. Use meeting time to discuss strategic issues and options.

BVU provides training and consulting to hundreds of nonprofit board members and boards each year.  Please contact Elizabeth Voudouris at evoudouris@businessvolunteers.org for a sample dashboard or to learn more about BVU’s services to strengthen your board.

Board members from two different nonprofits called me to express concern and surprise after learning in recent board meetings that their organizations were in financial distress or even crisis.  Both indicated that while they were seeing regular financial statements, they were not seeing anything that related to cash flow.  Both attributed the distress to a shortfall in foundation funding.  They each indicated that the boards were surprised by this news!

Boards should not be surprised by the financial status of the organization.  Given the impact of our nation’s financial crisis on funding sources, including foundations, there should be contingency plans in place.  The full board (not the Finance Committee, the Treasurer or the chief executive) is responsible for the financial statements and the financial viability of the organization.  So what can boards do to ensure that they are not surprised?  At BVU, we work with hundreds of boards each year, and find the following to be useful:

Establish a strong Finance Committee – Recruit more than one person with the relevant skills and expertise to work with staff to develop a realistic budget and financial forecasts at regular intervals (Quarterly? Monthly? Weekly?).  Ensure that the board’s financial reports are useful for forecasting and decision making.

1. Develop a one-page dashboard – Identify the key measures that board (and staff) must monitor on a regular basis to ensure that the organization is making progress towards financial, fundraising and programmatic goals.  For each category, track progress against budget-to-date and compare with numbers from the previous year.  Focus on key variances.  This is an excellent tool to help boards provide accountability, plan and make decisions, but it does not replace the need to provide financial statements to the board.
2. Create a culture of transparency and accountability – Share the financial forecast and the dashboard with the full board at each meeting.  Discuss options, priorities and realistic strategies for board and staff to help raise funds or reset the budget.  Access to this information should not be limited to the Finance Committee or the Treasurer.  The chief executive should feel comfortable that the board is a partner in addressing challenging financial issues.
3. Use meeting time to focus on important issues – View board and committee meetings as precious time where the organization’s board can focus on the issues that matter most.  Don’t waste time on details or reports that board members can read in advance or see in the dashboard. Use meeting time to discuss strategic issues and options.

BVU provides training and consulting to hundreds of nonprofit board members and boards each year.  Please contact Elizabeth Voudouris at evoudouris@businessvolunteers.org for a sample dashboard or to learn more about BVU’s services to strengthen your board.

Board members from two different nonprofits called me to express concern and surprise after learning in recent board meetings that their organizations were in financial distress or even crisis.  Both indicated that while they were seeing regular financial statements, they were not seeing anything that related to cash flow.  Both attributed the distress to a shortfall in foundation funding.  They each indicated that the boards were surprised by this news! 

Boards should not be surprised by the financial status of the organization.  Given the impact of our nation’s financial crisis on funding sources, including foundations, there should be contingency plans in place.  The full board (not the Finance Committee, the Treasurer or the chief executive) is responsible for the financial statements and the financial viability of the organization.  So what can boards do to ensure that they are not surprised?  At BVU, we work with hundreds of boards each year, and find the following to be useful:

Establish a strong Finance Committee – Recruit more than one person with the relevant skills and expertise to work with staff to develop a realistic budget and financial forecasts at regular intervals (Quarterly? Monthly? Weekly?).  Ensure that the board’s financial reports are useful for forecasting and decision making.

1. Develop a one-page dashboard – Identify the key measures that board (and staff) must monitor on a regular basis to ensure that the organization is making progress towards financial, fundraising and programmatic goals.  For each category, track progress against budget-to-date and compare with numbers from the previous year.  Focus on key variances.  This is an excellent tool to help boards provide accountability, plan and make decisions, but it does not replace the need to provide financial statements to the board.
2. Create a culture of transparency and accountability – Share the financial forecast and the dashboard with the full board at each meeting.  Discuss options, priorities and realistic strategies for board and staff to help raise funds or reset the budget.  Access to this information should not be limited to the Finance Committee or the Treasurer.  The chief executive should feel comfortable that the board is a partner in addressing challenging financial issues.
3. Use meeting time to focus on important issues – View board and committee meetings as precious time where the organization’s board can focus on the issues that matter most.  Don’t waste time on details or reports that board members can read in advance or see in the dashboard. Use meeting time to discuss strategic issues and options.

BVU provides training and consulting to hundreds of nonprofit board members and boards each year.  Please contact Elizabeth Voudouris at evoudouris@businessvolunteers.org for a sample dashboard or to learn more about BVU’s services to strengthen your board.

Ich bin auf ein neues Plugin für den Windows Live Writer gestoßen. Es erlaubt u.a. die Blogkommentare zu moderieren, ohne dabei das Dashboard besuchen zu müssen. Freischalten, Löschfunktion oder als Spam einstufen – leider scheint es nicht möglich zu sein auf Kommentare direkt zu antworten.
Ob es eine sinnvolle Erweiterung ist, oder nicht, das liegt wohl an den ganz persönlichen Bedürfnissen des Bloggers. Ich gönne mir immer einige Zeit zum ausprobieren in der alltäglichen Arbeit am Computer und entscheide dann, ob es nützlich ist oder nicht.
Momentan zweifel ich noch daran, dass es auch morgen noch installiert bleibt. Ich besuche die Dashboards sowieso mindestens einmal täglich um mir die Besucherzahlen anzuschauen, nachzusehen wie viele Artikel sich bereits für den nächsten Tag in der Warteschleife befinden und was es so an Neuigkeiten auf WordPress.com gibt. Bei der Gelegenheit bietet WordPress.com die Übersicht aller freizuschaltenden Kommentare direkt auf der Startseite des Dashboards an. Einfacher geht es eigentlich nicht.
Nebenbei bekomme ich auch noch Kommentare aus der Warteschlange per Email zugeschickt und kann dort mit einen Klick auf “Freischalten” alles erledigen. All diese Funktionen machen das Plugin bei mir persönlich eigentlich überflüssig. Kein Grund es nicht trotzdem mal ein paar Tage zu testen.

Wer noch nie ein Plugin installiert hat, es ist ganz einfach. Hier kann man es runterladen, dann verschiebt man es in den Ordner für Plugins und startet den Windows Live Writer. Den Ordner findet man meistens auf Laufwerk C, Programme, Windows Live Writer.

Übrigens hat das Plugin noch andere Funktionen. Man kann beispielsweise den Blog-Titel und die Beschreibung ändern. Die Funktionen habe ich allerdings direkt deaktiviert, denn so oft ändert man den Namen seines Blogs doch nicht, dass man es im WLW können müsste?

They’re still using analytic dashboards, but tying the data to strategic goals.

By Doug Henschen

It’s 7 a.m. in San Antonio, Texas, and Rich Marcogliese, chief operating officer of Valero Energy, is holding his usual morning meeting with the plant managers of 16 major refineries throughout the United States and Canada. On the walls of the HQ operations center are a series of monitors centered by a giant screen with a live display of the company’s Refining Dashboard. Whether the executives are in the room or connected remotely, all eyes are trained on the Web-accessible gauges and charts, which are refreshed with the latest data every five minutes.

“They review how each plant and unit is performing compared to the plan,” says Valero CIO Hal Zesch, “and if there is any deviation, the manager explains what’s going on at their plant.”

For Valero, surprisingly little-known for a Fortune 10 (that’s right, one-zero) company with more than $118 billion (with a “b”) in revenue, just one dashboard needle moving from green to red might signal millions of dollars at stake. The point of the dashboard isn’t to call managers out; it’s to give executives timely information so that they can take corrective action.

Valero’s Refining Dashboard is just the sort of cutting-edge decision-support tool that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of companies are now attempting to create. Those companies have embraced the idea that decisions based on fact will consistently beat those based on gut. Business bestsellers including “Competing on Analytics,” “Super Crunchers,” and “The Numerati” have documented that it’s an approach that works. Financial analysts, board members, and even the news media increasingly expect sound, data-backed analyses from top management. And when things go wrong, regulators and, in some cases, even district attorneys follow the numbers to trace bad decisions.

Plenty of obstacles stand in the way of better decision support, from backward-looking metrics and ill-advised goals to antiquated budgeting approaches and technophobic executives. For management teams that can make use of the data–and these days there’s always plenty of data–there are huge opportunities to improve efficiency, develop innovative products, get closer to customers, and outsell competitors.

Start With Goals

Valero rolled out its dashboard in early 2008 at the behest of COO Marcogliese. He had launched a Commitment to Excellence program aimed at improving performance, and he wanted to see real-time data related to plant and equipment reliability, inventory management, safety, and energy consumption.

Whether driven by Total Quality Management (TQM) programs, Balanced Scorecards, or another methodology (more on those later), information-driven companies tend to succeed by establishing clear goals and expectations that are aligned from the top of the organization down to departments and individual employees. When results start coming up short, executives can manage the exceptions along the way rather than hoping for the best and reacting to surprises at the end of a quarter.

 A major focus of Valero’s Commitment to Excellence program is reducing energy consumption, so the company is rolling out separate dashboards that show detailed statistics on power consumption by unit and plant. “Based on the data, managers can share best practices and make changes in operations to reduce energy consumption while maintaining production levels,” CIO Zesch explains. Estimated savings to date: $140 million per year for the seven plants where the dashboards are in use, with expected total savings of $230 million per year once the dashboards are rolled out at all 16 refineries.

The successes have created dashboard-envy within Valero, so IT is working on similar dashboard programs for sales and marketing as well as the strategic sourcing unit.

Focus On The Right Measures

The terms “scorecard” and “dashboard” are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction. Scorecards are all about tracking against defined metrics, and most scorecards are attached to a methodology, such as the Balanced Scorecard or TQM, says Mychelle Mollot, VP of worldwide marketing, analytics, and performance management at IBM. “Top executives have actually laid out a map for where they want to drive the business, and they’ve created metrics that will drive the behavior that will get them there,” Mollot says.

Dashboards display key performance metrics and perhaps green, yellow, and red zones, but they don’t tend to show predefined targets or goals established by management and aligned to strategy.

Whether they call their decision-support tools scorecards or dashboards, only a small percentage of leading companies have actually mapped out enterprise-wide goals with a formal methodology. (The Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame currently lists only about 120 members, including Best Buy, Hilton, UPS, and Wells Fargo.) Some companies come up with their own methodologies, but the key question is whether it’s a comparative decision-support interface –does it track performance trends relative to predefined goals? A much larger chunk of companies use dashboard-style interfaces that simply monitor the health of the business. “These types of decision-support tools aren’t often attached to a grand methodology or linked down to the bottom of the organization,” Mollot says.

It’s not that monitoring-oriented dashboards can’t be effective. But without high-level business strategizing (as Valero has done), there’s a danger you’ll end up sharing the wrong metrics. Sales stats and financial measures, for instance, can be lagging indicators, and decisions based on this data might miss a looming shortfall that might be obvious in sales pipeline information.

At Elkay Manufacturing, a $1 billion plumbing fixture and cabinetry maker, the CFO has led the company to embrace both the Balanced Scorecard (taught by The Palladium Group) and the Beyond Budgeting/Continuous Planning Framework (promoted by the Beyond Budgeting Round Table). The idea behind continuous planning is to be adaptive, revising plans and forecasts each quarter and always looking out six quarters rather than four.

 Elkay’s stated strategy is to grow profitably, so its sales-related scorecards and dashboards include profit metrics so that salespeople don’t just drive revenue at the expense of the bottom line. Controller John Hrudicka says the company’s decision-support tools have identified initiatives that produced more than $13 million in hard-dollar profit improvements while “helping us transform our culture to a profit mind-set.”

Elkay put most of its decision-support technologies in place over the last two years. It tapped Host Analytics’ software-as-a-service financial performance management system, which it uses for budgeting, planning, reporting, and end-of-quarter financial consolidation. The system also supported the move, completed in September, to 18-month budgeting and planning cycles. Elkay chose Acorn Performance Analyzer software for activity-based costing–analyses that reveal the true cost of delivering products (including manufacturing, distribution, sales and marketing, and warranty claims) as well as the true cost of sustaining customers (including products purchased, discounts applied, and ongoing service and support costs).

Elkay already had both Oracle (PeopleSoft) and SAP ERP systems in place as well as an Oracle data warehouse. For decision support, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition pulls information from all of these systems to deliver multilevel scorecards and dashboards. “It starts with the corporate scorecard and it rolls down from there to the divisions and all the way down to individual-employee goals that affect bonuses at the end of the year,” Bauer says. Bottom-up feedback, he says, is gathered during quarterly strategy reviews.

Foster A Data-Driven Culture

Few companies have worked as hard or as long at data-driven decision-making as Johnson & Johnson. In the 1980s, J&J embraced TQM and Phil Crosby’s Zero Defects approach. In the ’90s it moved on to Malcolm Baldrige-type criteria for performance excellence. Early in this decade, J&J focused on process excellence, and by mid-decade it had embraced powerful improvement tools including Six Sigma, Lean, Value-Stream Mapping, and Design Excellence. What most of these approaches have in common is an iterative process of assessing opportunities, developing goals, implementing improvements, and then monitoring their success with the aid of decision-support tools. Indeed, fact-based decision-making is now “part of the culture at J&J,” says Karl Schmidt, VP of business improvement, who leads a nine-person internal management consulting group.

J&J is decentralized, so there’s no single, overarching corporate dashboard. There are separate dashboards–or in some cases, balanced scorecards–within the pharmaceutical, consumer, and medical device and diagnostics product divisions and the dozens of companies in each of those groups. The key performance indicators include a mix of financial metrics (revenue, net income, cash flow); customer metrics (satisfaction, loyalty, market share); internal process metrics (product development, manufacturing efficiency, fulfillment); and employee measures (engagement, satisfaction).

As late as 2006, J&J estimated that all the top-line and bottom-line improvements rolled up across the company totaled more than $1 billion a year in “value creation,” Schmidt says. But more recently, those improvements haven’t been enough to insulate J&J from what he describes as “brutal economic conditions.” Early this month, J&J announced a restructuring that will cut up to 7,000 of its 117,000 employees worldwide. Restructuring is rife across the pharmaceutical industry, and Schmidt says having good decision-support tools is more important than ever.

“It comes down to fact-based decision making,” he says. “In tough economic times, you want the best available data and analysis to make better decisions.”

Cater To The Audience

Maine Medical Center created a dashboard this year to help it win reaccreditation as a Magnet-Designated Hospital for nursing, an elite distinction. The dashboard delivers eight key metrics on patient safety and satisfaction by hospital operating unit, so that nurses, nurse directors, and administrators can log on and check personal performance, unit performance, and rollups for the entire hospital.

But Maine Medical’s deployment underscores the decision-support truism that some executives are more savvy than others when it comes to using these tools. “I walked into the chief nursing officer’s office one day, and she had about 50 paper printouts of dashboard views wallpapering an entire wall,” says Doug Salvador, the center’s associate chief medical officer. “It’s nice that she valued the information that much, but I had to show her that she could always access historical views.”

Over the last three years, the medical center has used SAS Institute’s balanced scorecard software to codify patient-care quality and safety strategies as well as supporting goals and measures. Most goals are delivered though performance-improvement dashboards, which seem to be getting the job done. Maine Medical has been named to the U.S. News and World Report Best Hospitals list three times (for gynecology, orthopedics, and heart care), and its Cancer Institute in Scarborough, Maine, was selected this year as one of five model cancer programs in the United States by the Association of Community Cancer Centers.

Salvador says his group spends most of its time asking front-line caregivers how they can improve reports, scorecards, and dashboards, but the team is also “picking off” once tech-averse executives by making their decision-support tools more useful to them. In the past, the chiefs of surgery and medicine barely used the decision-support tools, he says, “but they now have access to physician-specific scorecards with performance data that they need when it’s time to re-credential doctors within their departments. They used to get e-mailed reports that weren’t very complete. Now they’re getting more data, and it’s presented in a more useful format.”

Look To The Internet

Some of the most decision-support-savvy executives can be found in e-commerce. For example, Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, is said to use dashboards to help set his daily schedule. If the problem of the day is gross profit margins, that will drive who he calls in for a discussion. “If you get invited into a meeting with that kind of metrics-oriented CEO, you better have your hands on the data, including the detail at the next level down,” says David Schrader, director of strategy and marketing at Teradata, the vendor behind Overstock’s data warehousing environment.

Overstock can roll up its profit and loss statement every two hours, “which is absolutely world class,” Schrader says. That capability gives executives accurate, up-to-date insight into the financial results they can expect, and it also drives operational decisions such as spot buys of TV advertising.

Whether a company is an e-commerce powerhouse or not, digital marketing channels like e-mail, social media, and online advertising networks are increasingly important. Thus, top executives should be watching forward-looking, upstream measures such as Web site performance, Web-driven lead generation, and sales pipeline information. Here, again, you must be careful to select the right metrics.

“A lot of people are measuring the wrong thing, like how many people came in the door,” Schrader says. “What you really want to measure is how many people came in the door and became qualified leads.”

And once prospects become customers, you’ll want to know if they are good or bad customers. That’s where analyses such as activity-based costing and customer segmentation come in. Lessons learned should come full circle and be reapplied to lead-generation campaigns and marketing offers.

Tell A Story With The Data

Considering all the IT systems now in place, the growing dominance of Internet-based marketing, and the intensely digital nature of services-based industries, there’s no doubt that data-driven decision making is the way forward. But the key questions are, how prepared are these organizations to synthesize and share key performance indicators, and how prepared are executives to draw insight from information?

CIO surveys, software sales stats, and business bestsellers point to surging interest in business intelligence and business analytics. Villanova University’s School of Business recently responded by changing its curriculum with data-centric decision making in mind. For example, it added an undergrad course on analytics and risk assessment, and it updated the statistics courses required at both the undergrad and MBA levels to be more practical and applied.

The curriculum changes were guided in part by extensive interviews with a group of 16 business leaders (including Schmidt of Johnson & Johnson). The resulting “Current State of Analytics in the Corporation” report says nearly as much about tech skills as it does about executive decision support: The sweet spot for new hires continues to be that elusive combination of technical and business know-how and the ability to “tell a story” with data.

BI atau Business Intelligence yang telah tumbuh pesat dalam satu dasawarsa terakhir mempunyai arti yang luas.
Pada awalnya BI hanya menyangkut pada database Customer saja, namun sekarang telah meluas pada semua segi dari suatu bisnis.

Sebenarnya tujuan BI menyangkut dua hal penting:

- Data Integration, yang berarti menarik data dari berbagai sumber data yang terpisah-pisah dalam berbagai format data, dari berbagai Database lalu disimpan pada satu Database dan membuatnya dapat di access dengan mudah dengan cara yang seragam. Database ini biasa disebut dengan Data Warehouse.

– Analysing and Viewing, yang berarti menyediakan cara untuk menampilkan dan melakukan analisa data dengan cara yang baru dan menampilkan informasi yang sebelumnya tersembunyi. Aplikasi untuk keperluan ini biasa disebut dengan BI Application.

Tujuan tersebut telah dikembangkan selama bertahun-tahun. Awalnya tampak seperti alat untuk market research,  untuk mengentahui karakteristik Customer, untuk menemukan pola-pola dalam Pendapatan dan Keuntungan, atau untuk memahami perilaku Customer, namun saat ini tool yang sama juga dipakai untuk melihat berbagai aspek bisnis.

Istilah BI sendiri pertama kalinya diperkenalkan oleh Howard Dresner dari Gartner Group pada tahun 1989 dengan defenisi
sbb.:

“Business Intelligence is a set of concepts and methodologies to improve  decision-making in business through the use of facts and fact-based systems”

Menurutnya BI adalah sekumpulan konsep dan methodologi untuk meningkatkan pengambilan keputusan dalam bisnis dengan cara menggunakan fakta dan sistem yang berdasarkan fakta.

Bahan dasar dari BI adalah semua transaksi individu, dan data diambil dari berbagai sisi bisnis. Dengan BI setiap detail data bisa diambil namun akan disimpan dengan menggunakan struktur data yang baru sehingga detail tersebut dapat di access dari berbagai sudut pandang. Sehingga untuk setiap pertanyaan bisnis BI akan dapat memberikan jawaban secara tepat dan cepat.

BI akan memberikan sudut pandang bisnis dengan detail yang belum pernah ada sebelumnya. Hal itu dapat dicapai dengan cara merestrukturisasi informasi dengan tepat yang dibutuhkan oleh setiap fungsi kerja, apakah fungsi kerja tersebut adalah market research,
quality assurance, general management atau fungsi kerja yang lain.

Fungsi-fungsi BI yang lain adalah;

-BI memungkinkan pebisnis untuk melihat kinerja bisnisnya dari berbagai sudut pandang, tidak hanya dari sisi accounting belaka.
-Untuk mengetahui pola belanja customer
-Untuk mengungkap hubungan antara suatu kejadian dengan kinerja dagang.
-Untuk melihat dampak nyata dari suatu promosi selagi masih berlangsung.
-Untuk mengungkap penipuan dan pemborosan yang tak berguna.
-Untuk melihat suatu problem selagi dibenahi

Singkatnya, BI memungkinkan untuk memanfaatkan nilai yang ada secara detail

Teknologi apa saja yang digunakan BI?

ETL Tool:
Agar data dari berbagai sumber data dapat di access, maka diperlukan teknologi yang bisa connect ke berbagai Database di berbagai platform. Proses ini meliputi Collection, Cleansing, Extraction, Transformation, and Loading, Tool yang menyediakan fungsi-fungsi ini biasa disebut ETL Tool. Ada berbagai macam ETL tool yang tersedia di pasar, tersebar dngan bebagai kelebihan fungsi dengan harga yang beragam juga.

OLAP Engine:
Agar suatu data dapat dilihat dan di analisa dari berbagai sudut pandang, maka data tersebut perlu disimpan dengan struktur multi dimensi, atau yang disebut dengan Multidimensional database. Untuk  mempercepat query dan analisa maka semua relasi data perlu disimpan dalam group-group dari item-item data yang behubungan, disimpan juga Jumlah item yg berhubungan, dan agregasi dari kuantitas data yang  berhubungan. Semua fungsi ini akan ditangani oleh OLAP Engine.
(Lebih jauh mengenai OLAP akan dibahas pada sesi tersendiri)

Query Tool:
Setelah data disimpan dalam Multidimensional Database, untuk menampilkannya diperlukan tool khusus yang dapat melakukan
berbagai query multi dimensi. Tool ini dapat membuat rumusan query multi dimensi yang kompleks dengan cara yang sederhana
tool ini biasa disebut dengan Query Tool. Beberapa produk Query Tool dipasaran telah dilengkapi juga dengan OLAP Browser
bahkan ada yang di paket dengan Reporting Tool.

Reporting Tool:
Pada Multidimensional Database reporting tool yang dipakai juga harus bisa membaca data multi dimensi.
Pada umumnya Reporting Tool bisa dijalankan dengan cara visual desain dan sudah dilengkapi dengan OLAP Browser.
Report dapat diexport dalam berbagai format sperti format CSV,  PDF file atau PPT file untuk keperluan presentasi.
Beberpa Reporting Tool di pasaran bahkan ada yang dilengkapi dengan Distribution Utility dan Schedulling.

Dashboarding Tool:
Informasi yang disampaikan untuk para pengambil keputusan biasanya tidak ditampilkan dalam angka-angka dalam tabel,
namun dalam bentuk grafik-grafik interaktif untuk mempermudah dan mempercepat pengambilan keputusan. Tool yang mempunyai kemampuan ini disebut dengan Dashboarding Tool.
Dashboarding Tool dilengkapi dengan berbagai macam grafik seperti Bar Chart, Pie Chart, Gauge Chart, dll. baik 2D maupun 3D,

Disamping Tool utama yang sudah disebut diatas, sebenarnya masih ada beberapa tool lagi yang biasa dipakai baik oleh BI Developer ataupun oleh BI User. Mengenai hal ini akan dibahas disesi lain.

Reff:
Tiwana, Amrit, 2001. The Essential Guide to Knowledge Management, New York,USA, Prentice Hall
Kimbal, Ralp, 1996, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, New York-USA,  Jhon Wiley & Sons, Inc.

…because they get my all new Dashboard widget! It displays the posts on CP’s What’s New? blog, right from your dashboard!!

Here are some pics:

The front of the widget!

The back of the widget!

You can download it here!

You can download it here!

You can download it here!

…or from our Box.net widget!

 

-Mac Storm

Admittedly this post is a tad early, but I’m ready to get these holidays started! I’m actually not traveling this Thanksgiving, but I figured you might be traveling … even if it’s just be from Big D to Funkytown. (That’s Dallas to Ft. Worth for you non-DFWers.)

And what does a good road trip or plane ride need besides great company? Good tunes, man. So in honor of the turkey that sacrificed himself (or tofu for all you weirdos), here’s some tryptophanic tunes. Bon Appetit!

1. Half Way Home • TV on the Radio
2. Two Weeks • Grizzly Bear
3. Shiny • The Decemberists
4. Hideaway • Karen O and the Kids
5. Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want • She & Him
7. Turn a Square • The Shins
8. Albatross, Albatross, Albatross • Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band
9. Lisztomania • Phoenix
10. Dashboard • Modest Mouse
11. Shampoo Suicide • Broken Social Scene

………………………………………………………………………………………

Want more mixed well? Check the archives here.

How to create Dashboards for Free?

So you are looking for options to build dashboards?

Ingredients : Apache + PHP + MySQL + Free Charting Engine

Cost : $0

Time : Tons of it (just kidding)

Previously, we did a detailed analysis of various methods of creating dashboards. We had to categorize the different methods as Type – 1 , Type – 2 , Type – 3 and super ubiquitous ‘Excel Method’ which is Type – 4

Today we are going to discuss a dashboard building process which suits any economic conditions. Thats right, you won’t need to spend a single dollar on any software.

This method belongs to the “Type – 1” method which means you will need a lot of coding skills in php,html, and javascript.

There are lot of charting vendors who sell Java, .net and Flash chart components. Most of them are commercial and there are few good open source and free options. We are going to consider the Open Source Flash Charting Engine for this tutorial.

Flash charts are simply beautiful and having a free price tag is just awesome.

Download, install and Testing

Download and install is just the act of unzipping the files and placing them on the webserver

Before we can start you should have downloaded the Open Flash Chart .zip file.

Open the .zip file and copy the open-flash-chart.swf to the root folder of your web server.

You can move all the files to wherever you want on your webserver, but for this tutorial lets keep everything nice and simple. When you finish the tutorial and have a working example, then move the files to a better location. If anything stops working, you know what file you moved and so should be able to fix the paths.

So, once you have open-flash-chart.swf in the root directory of your web server, copy the folder ofc-library to the root directory. Set the permissions of this folder and the .php files inside it so they will run correctly.

Connecting to database, get data and render as chart

This particular piece of code demonstrates just how to do this

<?php

// What you will probably do is:
/*

if( isset( $_GET['id'] ) )
{
$user = intval( $_GET['id'] );
$sql = ‘SELECT * FROM results WHERE fk_user=’.$user;
}

*/

// I don’t have any tables set up, so I
// simulate getting data from the database.
// This SQL will get the DB to produce a
// nice sin wave:
$t = array();
for( $i=0; $i<(4*3.14); $i+=0.3)
$t[] = ’select sin(’. $i .’)’;

$sql = implode( ‘ union ‘, $t );

//
// This opens the db connection as usual:
//
// $db = mysql_connect(”localhost”, “user”,”***”) or die(”Could not connect”);
// mysql_select_db(”database”,$db) or die(”Could not select database”);
//
// Uncomment the above lines and fill in the db, user name and password, then
// delete the following two lines:
//
include_once( ‘includes/db.php’ );
$db = openDataBase( );
//
//

$data = array();
$res = mysql_query($sql,$db) or die(”Bad SQL 1″);
while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) )
{
$data[] = floatval( $row[0] ) + 1.5;
}
// use the chart class to build the chart:
include_once( ‘ofc-library/open-flash-chart.php’ );
$g = new graph();
$g->title( ‘Sin + 1.5′, ‘{font-size: 12px;}’ );

$g->set_data( $data );
$g->set_y_max( 3 );
$g->y_label_steps( 3 );

// display the data
echo $g->render();
?>

We are not going to replicate the tutorial here as the author has done a wonderful job of not just providing the charts for free but also complement it with a variety of tutorials.

The flash engine has lot of chart types but could be a disappointment for those who are looking for eye-candy gauges. But don’t worry, we have a fix for them as well. For Flash Gauges, try the open source gauge charts

Well, that covers the our first method of creating dashboards, which is one of the complicated and very involved method, hey but its Free!

One last thing, while we are at the topic, this is something related to Flash Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash

Well I finally have gotten around this week to listening to Dashboard Confessional’s new album “Alter the Ending.”  I only have the regular version and not the deluxe with all the acoustic.  I have to say that Dashboard Confessional’s sixth studio album is the best so far.  The history of this band started out as one person and expanded to a whole band.  And it just keeps getting better.  This album is worth buying the entire thing.  The only complaint I have is that a few songs in the middle sound a little too similar and made me tune out a little.  But It starts out strong with “Get Me Right” and ends with a bang with “Hell on the Throat.”

Great writing and beats.  Well worth it.

On November 17th when you start up your Xbox you’ll be hit with the Fall dashboard update that will include Facebook, Twitter, and Last.FM. Computers are already over saturated with social networking mediums and now your Xbox can join the fun. I’ve always played video games wondering “Man, I wish I could let all my friends online know what game I’m playing through my Xbox” and now I can finally! (sarcasm). In my opinion, people already update their Facebook statues and Twitter about nonsensical esoteric blurbs, most of which I couldn’t care less about, and I fear this will just make it worse. That aside, however, It’s still a really cool idea that I’m kind of excited to at least check out.

The addition of Last.FM however I find a little more interesting. I’m not entirely sure exactly how Last.FM works because I tried to use it, got frustrated and gave up, but coming from a person who often uses their Xbox to provide the music for a party I think I might get good use out of this addition to the Xbox live experience.

From Xbox.com:

“Sharing your passion for favourite tunes is also a major component for Last.fm on Xbox 360. You can vote ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ for each song to make sure you only hear your latest flames. Creating a play list for the living room is simple too.

There are more than 3.5 million songs available through Last.fm, and you’d need to be some kind of music robot to know them all in an instant! However by checking your friends’ play lists and by seeking out tracks of a similar style or mood you’ll soon be expanding your musical horizons and life doesn’t get any finer than that.

Last.fm for Xbox 360 can be sampled free by all Xbox LIVE members and the full service can be experienced if your status is Gold. However if you choose to take on Last.fm membership plus LIVE Gold membership you’ll gain even more terrific personalisation features.

With a music library so vast that you’ll never tire of it, the greatest games available on the planet; streaming movies and live TV shows plus an online community that’s millions strong, Xbox 360 is always delivering entertainment, your way.

Happy listening!”