It’s tough to refuse the fact that most of us love our mobile phones, tablets and ipads and with technology advancements and widespread adoption of Androids, iPhones, tablets and iPads it is becoming a big tug-of-war within the office to bring business applications like business intelligence, CRM into these mobile devices. Adding to this many organizations are even adopting a ‘BYOD’ (Bring your Own Device) policy to get started as quickly as possible and vendors are able to provide BI offerings that allow companies to provide enhanced analytics and information access.

Expanding Mobile BI market

Speed, power, money, followed by interactive dashboards and parametric reports are the reasons for businesses to deploy mobile BI as a key element of their BI environment. The adoption of iPad and tablets eventually becomes the first choice for BI users. Predicting the potential user centric market many vendors have started their development efforts in expanding the mobile BI by bringing in attractive dashboards, user friendly navigation etc, while organizations too are slowly switching their adoption towards the mobile BI than implementing an in-house solution.

Vendor’s delivery model

Companies like ZSL, expands their mobile BI offerings to meet business needs and offer high level of interactive dashboards and ease of use full spectrum BI applications that provide end users liberty to do proper decision making. Eventually these features and functionality within the mobile environment as similar as web-based or desktop application leverage an alternative solution to the BI users. Consequently organizations will no longer required the option of selecting on-premise BI; they would rather prefer a single solution choice of Mobile BI with more real-time, in-memory and advanced analytical access.

Although it is just the outset of the mobile development, more advanced solutions will be developed constantly to fulfill the growing requirement of the users on the roads. With continued growth in mobile application development and analytics integration, companies can get a complete insight of what is happening within their organization.

Rage on iPads and tablets devices

The increasing rage on iPads and tablets is yet another reason for the users to prefer mobile BI. Users have widened their adoption to iPads and Tablets PCs and vendors to support the increasing demand are developing application that can be easily be integrated with any platform. As the use of tablets and iPads are invariably increasing, BI adoption is more likely to expand exponentially within organizations as usage patterns expand to more employees

Sales Analysis and Visibility for the users

Aside from overall use, sales analysis has always been at the forefront of mobile BI adoption. This provides the basis for more in-depth analysis in relation to customers, suppliers, product movement, and industry. Therefore, sales managers and other users involved in partnering or supply chain management (SCM) will no longer need to download or refer outdated reports henceforth more opportunities in hand and more business relationships providing visibility to their business.

Mobile BI is here to stay, and will continue to grow rapidly, as employers increasingly look to keep managers and decision-makers “on the hook” on a 24×7 basis. In other words, certainly there’s hope — but there’s also hype.

About the Author

Shaughn is an industry analyst for business intelligence. For over ten years, he has assisted clients in business systems analysis, software selection and implementation of enterprise applications. Shaughn is the channel expert for BI for the small and Mid-Market segments at ZSL and conducts research of leading technologies, products and vendors in business intelligence, marketing performance management, master data management, and unstructured data. He can be reached at shaughnk@zslinc.com. And please visit Shaughn’s blog at zslbiservices.wordpress.com

The most essential raw material when making a decision is your Information. Organizations today have access to almost unlimited amounts of data – sales, demographics, economic trends, competitive data, consumer behavior, efficiency measures, financial calculations, etc. However, many decision makers in organizations feel mazed and bewildered. They have islands of data and still are not capable of making the correct decisions, or understanding where they really are. They fall under the hallucination that mere data is enough. If we have the data and facts, then what more do we need? In today’s connected digital economy, it is very easy to get data yet it is difficult to convert this data into meaningful information for a perfect decision making.

Here are few approaches you can adapt to make better decisions.

1. Work on the right decision problem. Be careful in stating the problem, and avoid unwarranted assumptions and option-limiting prejudices.
2. Specify your objectives. Determine what you want to accomplish, and which of your interests, values, concerns, fears, and aspirations are the most relevant.
3. Create imaginative alternatives. Alternatives represent different courses of action, and your decision can be no better than your best alternative.
4. Understand the consequences. Determine how well different alternatives satisfy all of your objectives.
5. Grapple with your tradeoffs. Since objectives frequently conflict with each other, it becomes necessary to choose among less-than-perfect possibilities.
6. Clarify your uncertainties. Confront uncertainty by judging the likelihood of different outcomes and assessing their possible impacts.
7. Think hard about your risk tolerance. In order to choose an alternative with an acceptable level of risk, become conscious of how much risk you can tolerate.
8. Consider linked decisions. Many important decisions are linked over time. The key to making a series of decisions is to isolate and resolve near-term issues while gathering information relevant to issues that will arise later.

To know more on how we have created better decision systems, please talk to Shaughn Knight.

So comes the Social BI

What is Social BI?

Social BI is nothing but the idea that we can consolidate from the social information to make better-informed choices that has imbued our lives. Social BI aims to bring that same power to making better business decisions. To be precise or simple social BI helps you to make right business decision through the socially available information in Wikipedia, facebook, twitter about your product, competitor or services.

Social business intelligence can offer organizations a means of achieving more accurate, and therefore more useful, data. People consistently express personal opinions on a diverse range of subjects via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By monitoring, compiling and analyzing freely-shared thoughts on these sites, firms can gain substantial insight as to how their industries, organizations, products and services are viewed by the public. This information can then be leveraged to improve their offerings.

Business intelligence tools provide organizations with the means of transforming the monumental amounts of data generated on social media channels into a usable format. However, social business intelligence tools are only useful when properly implemented. To improve the quality of that data and their ability to analyze it, many organizations invest in association members’ software containing advanced business intelligence tools. By doing so, a firm can improve its knowledge of the industry and its customers and use that information to become more efficient, more productive and more appealing.

For more information on Social Business Intelligence, contact Shaughn Knight

1. Reports are inconsistent and does not truly reflect the real company information
2. There are lot of different teams working of lot of different tools and producing a lot of different reports
3. We have all these reports but now what? It is unclear on what we can do with this information
4. There is tremendous amount of data collected everyday but there is hardly any data analysis done on that
5. Disconnect between business and IT users

Also accompanied by them are challenges that have been unlimited over the years, those include:

1. Disconnect between IT and business users
2. Change management (Transforming Organization from current state to desired future state)
3. User adoption
4. Master Data Management (Defining and managing non-transactional data entities within an organization)
5. Reactive instead of proactive approach for BI
6. Lack of Strategy
7. Security and customization integration
8. Data Governance (Managing data assets formally throughout the enterprise)

However, there are key challenges that are hurdling to the success of BI & DW implementation:

1. Expense: It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more and takes months or years to implement a full-scale traditional BI solution. Traditional BI applications require a very time-consuming and usually quite expensive process of defining requirements
2. Moving Target: BI scope changes more rapidly than in other implementations, especially when the project is coupled to an ERP Business Transformation. These because any change in processes, business or organization influence the final outcome.
3. Sponsors and user commitment: in many cases users feel challenged by the new technology which changes the way they operate and in addition they have very demanding business cycles (think about Month End Closing Procedure); as a consequence they usually give low priority to the project.
4. Proper project positioning: “Business” and “Intelligence” are two common words which hide the complexity of the philosophy required implement a multilayer solution and the business transformation always associated with it.

For a Company to properly address these challenges it requires:

• Good functional/business/technical knowledge in the implementation team. EA experience would be a great benefit
• Maturity assessment to put in place a reasonable roadmap.
• Short projects (ideally 6 months) to put in place the BI architecture and a qualified BI department able to tune the solution without jeopardizing the principles.

The best way to do a BI project is to follow a methodology that has proven successful many times over before. The major BI vendors have focused on relatively large and expensive one-size-fits-all approaches that have left many companies searching for a BI solution that fits their needs. The report mining approach to BI provides an inexpensive and flexible approach to deliver validated data to users in the format (Excel) that gives them the ultimate in freedom and flexibility to generate whatever analytics they can conceive to deliver higher revenues and reduce expenses.

For more Information on how ZSL has helped companies to overcome these challenges, please contact Shaughn Kinight

Most companies have used Data warehouse & Business Intelligence consultants at some point of time – but what about outsourcing? What exactly the companies’ interested in? What works or what does not works for BI and DW projects?

Such questions are certainly expected from various decision makers with respect to the vendor selection till they get a proper solution.

How to select a vendor

Well, the unique selling point of any outsourcing vendor is their customer testimony. The published customer testimonial will show you only an ideal picture of the vendor’s perfection and not the failed projects. Practically failed projects of a vendor are tough to be identified.

Ironically the selection criterion for a suitable vendor becomes very critical. So how do you pick the one that is right for you?

You need to gather answers to some fundamental questions involving availability, security, performance, and customer service. From these information, the best way is to follow high-level, yet restrictive, criteria and only then compare them on a feature-by-feature basis.

• Meeting your Business Requirements: Be sure to carefully consider your business requirements and go with a vendor that meets them. You may risk going with a smaller vendor, but you are more likely to get the BI deployment you want.
• Availability: It’s important to understand if the service is deployed on an underlying infrastructure that is backed up with a meaningful service level agreement. The level of availability you need depends on the criticality of the service to your business. Nevertheless you’re looking to move your business intelligence systems to the cloud, it’s likely very important for the cloud service to be highly available. However, for moving secondary application you might not require high availability of the cloud solution. Security: The biggest objection about cloud computing is security, taking corporate information outside the four walls. It should be notable that vendor’s may use the same server to host even your competitors data. Most vendors go about cloud security through the conventional means of various levels of encryption, firewalls, etc. So make sure where is the vendor server that hosts your data center and what is their business continuity during natural disasters? This will give you a satisfactory figure of how your vendor will be able to manage your data in a secured way.
• Performance: As the cloud services gets matured; companies are expecting performance metrics from the vendors to support the growing business critical systems that make their business run. They expect a better performance than when it was on their own data center. So test your vendors asking how does the cloud service provider define performance? What metrics do they use? How does their definition of performance relate to end user satisfaction?
• Customer Service: As a company you need to analyze the vendor yourself by

• How quickly does a vendor return your calls?
• How open are they in discussing what kind of technology they use or who their providers are and how often they have downtime?
• What servers they use and the software they run and their disaster recovery plans?

What can be outsourced?

As generic rule, you can outsource anything but what do you want to achieve with outsourcing?
Is it the lower costs? Better service to users? Or both.

When you look at the triple factor Quality, Time and Cost,

1. Quality and Time ~ Cost Increases
2. Cost and Quality ~ Time Increases
3. Time and Cost ~ Quality increases

So quality, time and cost are invariably proportional to each other.

If you ask is it ‘the right choice’ for a company to offshore or even outsource it’s BI projects:

It depends on how much DW work you have, versus how much BI work. There are organizations which need to pull together over 6-8 sources of data, in large volumes (say over 10 Terabytes for 12 months data). I would say this is a DW environment, where a lot of integration is required. On the other hand, many organizations may need to pull BI from only 1-3 sources, or have very small data volumes (under 1 Terabyte). For the first type, having a DW is probably an essential pre-requisite for BI. For the second, it is not so much. The 2nd type of organization may even implement a BI tool directly on top of their operational source systems. My point is that it is easier to off-shore / out-source the DW work, but not so much the BI work. It’s important to keep the BI work on-shore as much as possible. I’d recommend a 70% onshore ratio for BI work. If you are building a fresh DW, it’s probably best to give responsibility to the same party for the BI, so that there is a single vendor to hold accountable. But even if you are going with an off-shore DW + BI implementation, insist that the BI team is predominantly onshore.  But if you are basically doing a “BI only” implementation, it’ll be better to find a local vendor. BI only iterations tend to be smaller (can be about 1 to 3 months). But where a new DW needs to be set up or new sources added to an existing DW, then it would be a longer project.

Off-shoring:

Off shoring is other dimension in outsourcing, where based on understanding of BI program, it can be thought of what can be delivered from offshore without degrading the quality of deliveries, over all. In any case, your offshore supplier should play the role of a partner in successful delivery of BI program. It is important to recognize that Business Analysis, Requirements Gathering, design documentation and Test Plans are the key to delivering a successful BI or DW Project, and these tasks must be performed on the client site by people that not only understand the Technology to be implemented, but also have Subject Matter Expertise. Off-shoring works, But ideally part of the off-shore team (30%) should travel and remain on-site for the duration of the project. If it is going to be a long project then plan to rotate the on-site visiting team. This increases exposure of the off-shore team to the local business customers, and IT staff. It also ensures someone goes off-shore who has personal relationships and understanding of the customers IT environment.

Considerations during Outsourcing

• Involve your outsourcing supplier at the beginning of program and start involving them very closely with your BI program, that would set the stage where at later part of program you can think of portion of program or bundled deliveries to be outsourced.
• For those services where requirements are not clear, or change often, and performance of services are difficult to measure, like a nice complex DWH and BI development project, you may go for outsourcing.
• Outsourcing can be done with DWH/BI program, but one should not start it without proper due diligence and proper thought process in mind
• Outsourcing of any application environment is something to be considered very carefully and that is double true for BI/data warehousing as the volatility of the environment is much higher than for any operational OLTP system
• Information Security can be a road-block. You should be clear on 3 things (a) How sensitive Information Security is for your organization? (b) What concerns does your Information Security officer or organization have about the project? (c) How will your vendor address these concerns, and satisfy Information Security? If you have a dedicated Information Security officer, ask them what their concerns would be. If your source data contains information that needs to be securely managed (credit card numbers, health-care details, addresses) and is regulated, then you may want to setup a remote-desktop capturing solution to help the remote team access local systems, without being able to copy any data. Depending on your budget, you may also invest in a test-data management tool, or a data masking tool, to provide the off-shore team test data that is anonymized, but still useful. Bottom line, it can be managed, with relatively little overhead, but you need to ensure your Information Security team buys-into the controls in place.

 What works for what?

Roughly an estimated BI Project life cycle would include

1. Project Initiation and Analysis:
2. Planning and Designing:
3. Development/Testing:
4. Go Live
5. Support

Nevertheless it is time and again proved that outsourcing is successful provided if you take care certain business perspective in order to manage your offshore team. This question whether to could be now has no meaning.

Below is a description which could be a better plan for Outsourcing,

1. Project Initiation and Analysis: Could be Outsourced but needs longer onsite visits for offshore business heads/experts to understand the environment to Analyze the existing business models of the industry
2. Planning and Designing: Could be outsourced with short term onsite visits for offshore experts, this area is the technical and functional experts who needs to work together to provide an overall design and upcoming plan for the BI environment.
3. Development/Testing/Support: This could be completely outsourced. The crucial part here is communication channel. The better the communication, the more service you receive from offshore. To build up the environment as per the agreed terms one need to have proper communication from time to time with offshore team, so that they could deliver the required development. Most of the time this area is misunderstood from the company’s perspective as they always feels that they have provided enough information. No one thinks it is a necessary to understand how much transition is being done within offshore team members, as they are the people who cater further services. However the company provided information at the beginning that does not really give full picture of what company needs. The co-ordination happens only when client gives a better time to their offshore team. There is always a possibility that few things are forgotten once after the analysis and few things are placed in the document after the analysis, and few things are not focused by company business consultants even before finalizing documents, even under 6-sigma there is a possibility for an error. So it significant that IT industry runs with communication, where there is less communication there is always a danger for disaster. So if this is handled with due care you are always successful in off-shored outsourced projects.
4. Go Live: This once again needs Onsite Visit by offshore team for giving the feel of end deliverable.

Hope I could put the points, as I tried to use very few technical terms in order to present it in simple manner for better understanding about how offshore and outsource models would work.
So I conclude by saying outsourcing provide you follow certain steps as above or you could gauge according to the company needs and understanding. Depending on your organization’s maturity to off-shoring, the type of project activities can be done; it is possible to look at optimized off-shoring. You could also look at a staggered approach where learning of one release are incorporated into the next and progressive increase the level of off-shoring

To know more on ZSL’s BI services and solutions, Contact Shaughn Knight.

BI facilitates companies to analyze data and turn it into valuable business information. As more data and applications migrate into the cloud, numerous new data sources are being created. Cloud-based BI and analytics offer companies and business users multiple benefits. Businesses of all sizes can leverage vast computing and storage resources in the cloud without having to invest in expanding their existing IT footprints or IT support staffs. BI providers are adapting their tools to this new reality, and successful companies must now evaluate and act upon this opportunity. In addition, cloud-based BI and analytics provide business leaders opportunities to quickly gather and act on granular insights from a mix of structured and unstructured data.

Cloud-based BI and analytics tools also relieve business users from trusting on their employees to generate reports or create dashboards for them, thus facilitating decision-makers to act quickly on rapidly changing market conditions. Thus enabling organizational leaders analyze the sales pipeline, monitor the results of marketing campaigns, or trends involving individual line-item expenses and releasing other departments/employees to focus on other activities.

The availability of cloud-based BI and analytics helps to have a greater collaboration and teamwork between decision-makers, including those who might be geographically separated. For instance, users of a particular BI tool can embed dashboards within its dedicated platform via a stream so that followers of that stream can then obtain and share real-time information. Hence provides business users to easily share ideas and insights with one another

These capabilities provide line-of-business users the ability to promptly and easily make informed business decisions across all levels of the organization.
Benefits of cloud BI

• Investment: Without any upfront cost, hardware and software systems can be managed remotely by the vendors or the services providers
• Opex Vs Capex: The Money that has been invested by the business people are expense incurred to create future benefit i.e. acquisition of assets that will have a useful life beyond the tax year
• Elasticity in terms of volume, usage, and price.
• Less reliance on internal IT resources.
• Scalability: Even the smallest businesses can have the ability to tailor a BI system to fit their needs and improve their businesses.
• Cost: Instead of buying complete software or full license, a Cloud-based system provide companies a subscription-based model that ensure companies paying only for their usage.

It is believed that 50% to 80% of all BI applications fall or can fall under the above criteria and therefore SaaS cloud BI will be a huge market. So if you are planning for a Cloud BI, then you have taken an apt decision at your level.
To know more on ZSL’s cloud BI services and solutions, Contact Shaughn Knight.

So what should an Organization do to avoid these frustrations?

Let us see this one by one.

Missing Strategy:

Forgetting to create a strategy before BI implementation is one of the common mistake that many organizations do before investing into it. The company must know what is the exact intention of implementing a BI in their organization, why are they implementing it, how a BI will drive their organization towards business benefits, ROI of the Organization etc.

Most of the companies fail to do these ground level researches within their organization. The management staffs involved in approving the budget is also not willing to do so. The reason may be they either don’t understand the benefits of a BI or they expect some else to do the ground level research and they will use it. This is the core factor that causes the downfall of BI in an organization.

Business intelligence is just like any other business improvement technique: there must be a strategy/plan/roadmap that describes exactly what it will do, how the organization must change to leverage it, and specifically how having it will drive positive business results.

Prior Preparations for a BI initiative:

 Before you plan for a new BI initiative, or looking to revamp a stalled BI program you need to make sure that your time, effort and money are not wasted. In order to foresee a successful implementation companies should have a track on necessary pre-conditions to achieve better outcomes.

What are these pre-conditions?

Pre-conditions are nothing but few prior preparations that you need to do before identifying a BI initiative

• Make sure your quality of data as the quality of the information is directly proportional to the quality of the data that you provide
• Make sure if you have a proper framework in place for managing and prioritizing your BI investments
• Make sure your employees or your vendor has necessary BI skill sets to use the technical methods in BI. Especially when you consider executives with less computer knowledge, they experience a very tough time with BI challenges. So executives must be aware of the challenges they might come across during BI initiative.
• Ensure your organization is aware of all the change management challenges in BI. In other words, it basically is a thought process; any time we’re asking someone to change the way they think about a problem or business situation, change management is a critical element They also need to identify and manage the risk involved with a BI initiative i.e. risks must be predicted, discerned and mitigate prior challenging your organization.

If your organization is capable to handle these pre-conditions, then you have crossed 50% of the frustrations in implementing a BI solution.

Lost Directions:

Assume that you are travelling on a road to success, at a point there are several roads diverging in different directions. What will you do, if you do not know the exact direction to success? obviously you will end up it losing your direction. The similar scenario happens in BI too. Organizations having multiple data warehouses, data repositories, BI environments, multiple BI tool sets, and multiple user communities lose directions while accomplishing BI.  The risk involved in such an approach leads to duplicated cost/effort and Incremental technical complexity and cost from multiple similar technologies in use. All those multiples are not necessarily bad, but they should not indicate an undiscriminating approach to BI.  It is a best approach to have the initial venture into BI with best guided by a BI strategy/roadmap and a BI data architecture plan.

Improper Execution

BI applications are not easy to use. It involves lots of user knowledge on tools and data structures and lots of manual effort. It takes too long for the BI team to complete projects or even to fulfill requests for minor enhancements/modifications or new reports and dashboards.  Your company may have well-articulated requirements, a sound BI strategy, and a good set of tools, but might not be good at designing, building, maintaining, and supporting BI applications.  The consequences would eventually leads to your BI applications that run slowly, break frequently, are hard to use, deliver uncertain results, take longer to build and cost more than they should. These factors indicate that your company’s BI execution is unconventional.

A Successful BI execution requires the following capabilities

• Adequate financial support from the management of an Organization
• Employees or external vendors  should have essential BI skill and complete involvement in the BI projects
• Use of a BI-specific development methodology
• Project management and change management skills and discipline

BI Impact

This is a common scenario faced by the organizations. They have invested, have one or more BI applications in hand, but they are unclear about the impact. The actual reasons are

The decision makers of the organization are not capturing the business value of their BI investments, limited usage of the BI that has been deployed and Key decision-makers in the business do not use information from the existing BI system. These reasons proportionally affect the additional funding for BI and increase the number of unsatisfied users in an organization who are to be the key decision makers. To overcome this scenario companies have to gather little information within their departments.

• Who are the major users in the company
• What and how the information from a BI tool will be utilized
• Which KPIs or strategic objectives will be advanced by it

Just by doing this little research you can easily overcome the related challenges and feel the BI impact within your organization.

The above discussed points may help you to overcome your frustrations and at the same time all these frustrations have proven solutions through successful implementation history by companies like ZSL. However, BI can be challenging to do well, but the potential business benefits make it worth the effort.

Would you like to know our successful implementation?

Would you like to see our happy customers who have come out of these frustrations?

Would you like to see a demo on our Business Intelligence and Datawarehousing (BI/DW) services

Email me your interests Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

ZSL’s SmartPrise BI®

SmartPrise BI® suite provides enterprises accurate, consistent and clear data in the form of reports, scorecards and dashboards that acts as a key information for decision and policy makers to give consents, frame policies and guidelines and allocate funds for different planned and ongoing activities across the organization. The suite is addressed to meet the intelligence analytics needs of wide range of industry verticals which includes Healthcare, Banking, Finance, Telecom, Pharma & Life Sciences, Travel & Logistics, Wholesale & Retail.

ZSL’s SmartPrise BI® suite includes:

• Enterprise Data Warehousing: ZSL follows on industry best practices in developing and delivering data warehousing platforms that span the business and analytical data warehouse needs of the enterprises.
• Enterprise Data Management: the platform brings together the various data sources through integration between various application systems such as CRM, ERP, Legacy and third-party applications and is organized and managed through well-built service oriented data architecture.
• Enterprise Data Delivery: ZSL’s SmartPrise BI® suite is flexible and agile that enables the users to have data drilled to any nuances and is delivered in any preferred format such as pie-charts, graphs, dashboards, reports and more. The reports can also be posted into a portal, emailed to users or allow for web-based access.

SmartPrise BI® suite is available for multiple deployment models – On Demand, SaaS & Cloud.

SmartPrise BI® Mobile
The mobile enablement of SmartPrise BI® suite enables the end users to access the mission critical reports over their smart phones and tablets such as iPhones, iPad, Blackberry, Windows Mobile & Brew devices.

Key Benefits

• Key information that analyses your present and past business performance and guides the decision makers to frame and consent policies and processes suitable to the organization at time of need
• Serves as a yardstick to measure your employee productivity, operation efficiency and business performance as a result of your new policies and programs
• Proven and successful methodologies to extract, manage and deliver data
• Centrally managed data, business hierarchies, rules and calculations to eliminate data silos and inconsistencies throughout the organization
• Proven and cost-effective BI&DW methodologies built on prudent architecture powered by IBM Cognos which offers seamless integration between various data sources and compatible for SOA, Web 2.0 and BPM capabilities
• Easy to interpret and analyze data using reports, charts, scorecards and dashboards in preferred formats that has a rich new look & feel and instantly accessible over web and mobile devices
• Faster implementation services and simple configuration procedures saving 30% of your time and money involved in implementation and roll-out
• Flexible, role-based security model to protect the reports and reporting resources appropriately and also includes extensible interfaces for integrating other security models if desired

Is your organization looking for a BI tool? Have your organization chosen the right one?

Email me your interests Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

Fairly speaking, ERP is the true backbone of any company or business. ERP was designed for efficient data entry and storage to provide much-needed capabilities, such as management of financial, product, human capital, purchasing and other transactional data within one environment. Certainly they are not the best tool for reporting as the information delivered by an ERP is at a very detail level. If you take any organizations and their top-level executives, they wouldn’t like to see business users essaying them the reports, they wanted it to be short and simple and easy to understand. So to ease the reporting structure and to make right and accurate decisions most organizations prefer a BI solution.

BI on the other hand provides robust access to different reports, dashboards and balanced scorecards facilitating business users in streamlining their business operations with accurate decisions. In simplest term just a facilitator for reporting and hence it is the decision-making solution for businesses so that they can cut costs and hence increase profits.

For any normal business, a need for an ERP, CRM or SCM system comes first and then they start thinking about using a BI solution. What if these organizations are given a chance to use BI along with their existing ERP or CRM tool? Is it possible for these Organizations?

The answer is SmartPrise BI. ZSL, Inc with an intention to showcase their BI capabilities to all small and midsized organization emerges with an exclusive, sophisticated and cost-effective BI add-on for CRM and ERP. Now the business users of small and midsized organization have to just integrate this add-on to their existing ERP/CRM system and get the complete benefit of that of a BI tool.

Salient Features:

• Cost effective implementation
• Filter, sort and analyze data.
• Formulate ad hoc, predefined reports and templates.
• Provide drag and drop capabilities.
• Produce drillable charts and graphs.
• Analytical features like ranking, filtering, sorting, group by etc…
• Dashboards with KPI reports
• Interval Grouping on date field
• Distribution reports with XML Publishing
• Export reports in different formats (PDF, XLS, TXT, HTML etc.)

In case of any further customization required to this add-on, based on the customer requirement, ZSL can provide the customization.

Is your organization looking for a vendor? Have your organization chosen the right tool?

Email me your interests Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

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From CRM to Supply chain management there are around 200 and above categories of software that helps companies in back office and front office operations which are considered to be an essential segment for a proper business management. Most companies require both these segments and the one particular tool that’s becoming more indispensable is the business intelligence and data warehousing (BI/DW) software enabling more effective business process management (BPM) by providing comprehensive analytics that are primal to sustain and support profitability and growth of an organization.

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business intelligence (BI) can be interpreted as a broad category of applications and technologies for accumulating, stacking, analyzing, and supplying access to data to help organizations/users make better business decisions. BI/DW applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. Thus leveraging data from various systems, applications, and databases, business intelligence software users can make the best-informed decisions more efficiently.

Key Benefits of Business Intelligence

Companies of all sizes can benefit from business intelligence software, and it is important to consider the fact that companies acting without it are in a sense running on gut feelings. Every company needs to think on its feet, and leverage its enterprise data for the greatest advantage. After all, this data is essential for conducting and understanding mission-critical activities, operational patterns, and industry trends. Every company has varying needs, and there are a wide variety of benefits within each company;

1. No More Guesstimate: Far too often, business data of organizations lacked unified structure and as a result guestimate was the best weapon for executives to make decisions while attempting to direct their companies into the future. Business intelligence can render precise historical data, forecasting and trending, real-time updates, synthesis between departmental data warehouse and even predictive ‘what if?’ analysis, eliminating the need to guesstimate.
2. Mobility: Availability of Mobile based business intelligence applications provide walkthroughs for users/executives to access key business metrics, reports and dashboards on iPhone, iPad, Droid or BlackBerry, giving sales and marketing people access to critical business information on the go.
3. Retain Your Customers: One of the great benefits of BI/DW tool is that it permits companies to attain visibility into what customers are buying or what they need , providing them the ability to gain additional profit and retain valuable customers.
4. Selling Opportunities: BI/DW software permits organizations to leverage customer data to build, refine and modify predictive models that help sales executives to up-sell and cross-sell products at appropriate customer touch points
5. Improve Efficiency: Apparent amount of time are wasted by companies in hunting data within their departments to find the information they want and process as a report to take a single decision. With the influence of business intelligence software, however, all the information is centralized and can be viewed in the form of dashboard or converted into a report, saving enormous amounts of time and improving efficiencies.
6. Greater lucrativeness: Business intelligence software can provide users greater insight into manufacturing costs and the ability to line up production on the go for greater profitability
7. Greater Inventory Management: BI helps organization to order the right amount of inventory at the right time so that customers receive their products when they need, thus avoiding over stocking
8. Business Insight: Business Intelligence has been very successful at explicating the complete insight of your business over a period of time. The tool can provide you insights on how many units were sold, through which store, in which geography, or by which customer segment. Hence, these issues are now well understood, and so the next generation of competitive advantage comes from analyzing unstructured content to understand how and why these things happen. From simple content-based metrics to sophisticated sentiment analysis, business intelligence software can provide a more complete view on customer and competitor experience and opportunities therein and help executives plan for the future.

What to Look for in a Business Intelligence Software Solution

While Analyzing BI/DW solutions for your business management needs, there are a few important features to look for.

• It’s a best way to find a web-based program, and one that offers unlimited data access as on-demand solution will provide accessibility for more users, and will support scalability should the company need to add more users and run more reports in the future.
• Not all business intelligence software is fully scalable, so choose one that addresses specific capacity needs.
• It is also important that a BI/DW tool should support several output formats, from spreadsheets to PDF documents for producing reports and to run the reports.
• Corporate data can be highly complex, and reporting tools should support that. In the same vein, the platform should offer predictive analysis, unlimited data access, and complex visualizations.
• The visualization abilities should range from simple charts and graphs, to maps, matrices, and histograms depending on the mathematical or scientific reporting necessity

Business Intelligence Is More Important Than Ever – Why?

Apparently, adopting a BI/DW solution is a smart step for companies of all sizes and in all industries because of its analytical possibilities and it is quite likely that soon, companies not adopting one will have a difficult time surviving the competitive world. Businesses are currently collecting more data than has been amassed before, and as a result IT organizations are spending billions of dollars investing in data warehouses and business intelligence tools.

In addition, with the surge or Web 2.0 technology within enterprise software, business intelligence systems are beginning to provide real-time information. Minimizing reaction time between an event’s occurrence the subsequent business decision is the most important point of business management, and while business intelligence solutions have been able to predict outcomes before, the availability of real-time data will further decrease any latency periods.

As you can see, BI/DW Solutions are more than just a reporting tool, as through recent technological advancements it now offers highly evolved predictive abilities. So when looking for business intelligence software, outline your goals and choose the scalable solution that best fits your informational needs. The more complicated your data, the more complex the visualizations should be; likewise, don’t select a convoluted system for simple data. And one thing your selection should include, no matter what your data needs, is real-time reporting and analysis.

Is your organization looking for a vendor? Have your organization chosen the right tool?

Email me your interests Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

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Why Big Data?

There has been a lot of talk about “big data” in the past year, what is big data? Why are we are talking about big data today?

Big data is nothing but the term that describes the voluminous amount of unstructured and semi-structured data that are created by an Organization i.e., data that would take too much time and cost too much money to load into a relational database for analysis.

There are several factors influencing to talk about Big Data

Varying data types: Until few years ago it was easy for organizations to capture the data that was transactional in nature and numeric to fit easily into rows and columns of a relational database. But today, the growth in data has predominantly increased from websites and social media contents that has made organizations find it difficult to structure the data

Advanced Hardware Technologies:  The advancement in price performance and technology of the hardware materials has finally made it easy to store and analyze the huge volumes of data at affordable prices. Vendors exploit the technology advancement by developing high speed analytical platforms to accelerate large volumes of data, while the open source community has developed Hadoop, a distributed file management system designed to capture, store and analyze large volumes of Web log data, among other things.

Outsourcing Big Data: Because of the complexity and cost of storing and analyzing Web traffic data, most organizations traditionally outsourced these functions to third-party service bureaus like Zylog. As the size and importance of data analysis increased, many are now eager to outsource this data to gain greater insights about customers. At the same time, virtualization technology is beginning to make it attractive for organizations to consider moving large-scale data processing outside their data center walls to private hosted networks or public clouds.

New and Exciting:. The biggest reason for the popularity of the term big data is that Web and application developers have discovered the value of building new data-intensive applications. To application developers, big data is new and exciting.

Use of Big Data Analytic

Now that we understand the business context for analytical platforms, an analytical platform is a data management system optimized for query processing and analytic that provides superior price-performance and availability compared with general purpose database management systems.

According to a survey, 72% of the organizations had purchased or implemented an analytical database whereas 46% have no plans to do so, 42% are exploring the idea and just 12% are currently evaluating vendors. On the whole, about 75% of the organization will have an analytical platform in the near future.

Implement a new BI architecture

The BI architecture of the future integrates traditional data warehousing technologies to handle detailed transactional data and file-based and non-relational systems to manage unstructured and semi-structured data. The key is to incorporate these systems into an amalgamated architecture that enables casual and power users to query report and analyze any type of data in a comparatively unseamed manner. This integrated information access is the hallmark of the next generation BI architecture. More immediately, companies are using Hadoop to preprocess unstructured data so that it can be loaded and integrated with other corporate data for reporting and analysis. This allows BI and ETL users to use familiar tools to query and analyze data.

Implement analytical platforms that meet business and technical requirements

Today, organizations implement analytical platforms for various reasons. For example, analytical appliances are fast to deploy and easy to maintain and make good replacements for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle data warehouses that have run out of gas and are ideal as freestanding data marts that offload complex queries from large, maxed-out data warehousing hubs. Analytical databases, as software-only solutions, run on a variety of hardware platforms and are good for organizations that want to tune database performance for specific workloads or run the RDBMS software on a virtualized private cloud. Analytical services are great for development, test and prototyping applications as well as for organizations that don’t have an IT department or want to outsource data center operations or get up and running very quickly. File-based analytical systems and non-relational databases are ideal for processing large volumes of Web traffic and other log-based or machine-generated data. Organizations need to carefully evaluate the type and capabilities of the analytical platform they need before purchasing and deploying a system.

Choosing a Vendor

When an organization is implementing or purchasing an Analytical database from a vendor they need to keep in mind the 4 important criteria before choosing them

• Whether the selected vendor will meet your requirement?
• How successful the vendors are in implementing an analytical platform?
• Whether the vendor is liked and trusted by other organizations?
• How efficient is their support and services?

Interestingly the pricing, customer references and vendor incumbency should be considered as minimum qualifying criteria.

A vendor should have the ability to meet more of a customer’s requirement. This is because many analytical platforms implemented by the startup vendors are new to the market and heavily priced and customers might not know the exact value of the product. So Organizations should make sure that the product they are planning to implement meets their current and future requirement of the DW architecture. Also, Organization should look for the quality and responsiveness of the vendor to meet their needs.

How can your organization choose the right vendor? How can you get benefited by Big Data Analytic?

Email me your interests Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

BI/DW for BFSI

Business intelligence (BI) not only can support, grow and ensure the success of the BFSI companies but also its users and other professionals involved with it.

Banking:

• BI facilitates the banking organization to change the financial performance and allows the organization to set up and meet goals and track progress using a huge volume of information, integrated from numerous enterprise systems and sources. Banking professionals and stakeholders can monitor their financial strength and create and share reports to abide by the government and industry regulations
• BI helps to excel the banks in customer service and meliorate customer acquisition with targeted marketing and market research. Users can distinguish the most profitable customers and analyze buying behavior and preferences
• BI helps users to measure risk trends and forecast profitability with reliable data. Moreover it supports all banking requirements and analytical needs including credit analysis, regulatory compliance, operations management, loan monitoring, dealer loan analysis, demographics, customer profiling and many other factors of business success.

Financial services

• BI enables the users to identify and focus on business factors that are in need of betterment or fine-tuning. Financial services companies can maximize operational efficiency and gain profit margins by establishing and cascading new strategy and monitoring operational performance and tactical performance, KPIs and metrics. Automated alerts enable the business user to customize information views and receive updates when a critical threshold has been crossed; thereby ensuring that corrective action is taken swiftly and decisively.
• BI facilitates to analyze and manage centralized administration of all consumer information, with data integrated from several enterprise systems and sources. Users can create personalized dashboards to view this information in a convenient way can be easily understood by them. They can summarize data and drill down data to present results in charts, graphs, and gauges for presentations and analysis.. Users can analyze consumer credit and monitor activity to identify the most profitable markets, customers and demographics, and to mitigate default and risk.

Insurance

• BI facilitates insurance companies to manage and analyze Sales, marketing and channel partners thereby enabling the business user to monitor information from various distribution channels and identify which customers are more profitable and forecast results with complete insight into which channels are the most cost efficient
• BI helps in agent performance analysis to identify cost saving opportunities and increasing yield. Managers can promptly determine which agents have the highest customer retention rates and monitor actual results against plan

• Claims results can be monitored and new trends and strategies can be deployed to detect fraud and risk causing factors. Users can establish automated alerts to notify them of specific issues so that the user can take quick execution to resolve problems or determine the root cause before missing the target
• Manage and Analyze actuarial and risk factors by  evaluating new trends, identifies areas and markets where risk is increasing and enables swift risk analysis with robust reporting, charts, graphs, gauges, alerts and other tools to support decision-making and extenuate risk.
• BI supports all insurance requirements and analytical needs including credit analysis, regulatory compliance, operations management, policy monitoring, underwriter and loan analysis, demographics, customer profiling, claims analysis and many other factors of business success.

Advantages of BI/DW services and solutions in BFSI industry

• Maintain and Ensure to meet the regulatory, governmental and industry compliance by balancing the risk involved between business and growth
• Produce user-friendly  Reports on performance, customer demographics and other factors through dashboards and KPIs to the management
• Analyze and act on customer business intelligence
• Provide a bird’s view structure of risk, customer profiles, products, services, regions, sales, marketing and other information and indeed, increase customer profitability, ameliorate customer service and cut down operating costs and risk
• Fulfill user needs for diverse views and perspectives and provide custom support for individual roles, functions and team activities
• Boost revenue  and Improve efficiency of the overall business process and increase the confidence of decisions making for the management
• Increase value of investment with full insight into costs, performance and risk factors and Leverage investments in existing resources and infrastructure by integrating data from existing sources
• Assist in cost control, resource allocation and operational management
• Ensure accurate, timely decision-making with granular, enterprise-wide information, graphical displays and personalized dashboards and alerts to provide up-to-date information and simple analysis
• Identify and take corrective measures for inefficiencies, process issues, and under performance using powerful key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics
• Calculate and adapt pricing and strategies based on accurate forecasts and trends
• Align performance with strategy and objectives and enforce accountability
• Accomplish complete insight into financial and operational results, claims adjustment and management, overhead costs and fraud and risk management

Is your organization into BFSI ? How can your organization adopt successful business intelligence implementation? Email your interest to Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

The adoption of Business Intelligence systems is vital to the smooth and coordinated operation of each and every organization. However; they are becoming more complex day by day. New sets of consumers which were not present before are entering market continuously. So the taste, demand and expectations of the consumers are always evolving. If business organizations fail to understand their markets and consumers then they will probably fail to achieve their organizational business goals as well. The best way to gather these in depth information is by using intelligence services which highly rely on sophisticated technologies.

Key determinants of the success of Business Intelligence systems

There are few factors that determine the success of BI system. Most importantly a company should be unified in contributing their responsibility towards a BI process. It is not the responsibility of a single department of a company; it’s almost the responsibility of all the other departments to contribute for the BI process. Secondly, common definitions are required to be made available before approaching for a BI Solutions and also the current BI stack, Processes and Organization structures are to be assessed. A preplan regarding storing the data, understanding the users are also major factors influencing the success of BI implementation.

An organization also needs to decide very early of the planning phase whether to build or buy data mart for their system. Considering all the business Intelligence components choosing a good system integrator and starting with high value but simple business component are always the foundation of a successful BI system.

Whose responsibility is it to initiate and implement the BI system?

Initially it’s the responsibility of the top management to realize the need of such a system. The second phase requires them to consult about it with the IT consultants within the organizations. The third phase should involve an open discussion between all the department managers of the firm.  A separate board of members needs to be created from there on. But the key factor is to remember that when we talk about BI it means that the entire organization is someway responsible for a successful initiative and final implementation.

Impact of successful adoption of the BI system

More accuracy in decision making, a quick upraise in the profit of your entire business, greater customer satisfaction these are the most visible impact of a successful implementation. But it must be cited that it may take quite a few long before an organization can observe an immense change in numbers in all these areas. This entirely changes from organization to organization.  The managements in all the level of an organization will start to get a broader picture of their business processes that is for sure. As a result accountability will increase from day 1. In some cases a decrease in overall expenditure of a company can also be expected. Business and decision making processes will take less time and the overall pace of the company will increase as a result of the implementation.

How can your organization adopt successful business intelligence implementation? Email your scenarios to Shaughn Knight, AVP – Business Development and Inside Sales Operations.

To overcome such challenges you need a framework that should be very effective in means of organizing and analyzing the vast amount of information generated in the retail business, align your business with client needs, differentiate your product than that of your competitors, should optimize product mix and space utilization, and finally should help you to generate a more effective business mode to keep you always ahead of the profit margin. This can be done only if you have a Business Intelligence (BI) system in place. Retail is all about getting the right product at the right time at the right price. However, the right location and mix of web and brick and mortar facilities also plays an important factor in the industry. If the customer is unable to find your business obviously they are not going to reach you.

You may think, gathering and analysis of business intelligence is an easy task. Trust me; it is not. The retail industry by itself is awash in best of breed, enterprise and legacy systems to manage everything from

• Traditional retail information, including point of sale data, gross margins, turns, and gross margin return on inventory investment (GMROI);
• Market data, including market share and competitor pricing;
• Promotional data, including special pricing offers and vendor contributions, such as promotional allowances and coop advertising fees; and
• Client data, including demographics and various loyalty and client value metrics

If the retailer is to remain competitive, executives, managers and business users must have access to the most complete information with full insight into results and critical issues and the ability to quickly analyze, present and report these results to support decisions and adapt to the changing market.

Advantages of using a BI framework:

• Provide you simple dashboards that enable swift reporting and analysis of information integrated from numerous sources. These tools digest large volumes of information and convey it in an intuitive format, making it easy to classify and respond to critical, time-sensitive events. They also help in exploring issues and trends without getting completely lost in a big pool of information.
• Deliver information through personalized BI dashboards and charts, graphs, gauges, automated alerts and other views designed to meet the needs of the individual user and to support their role and function
• Contour and optimize resource capacity and merchandise management
• Determine and manage supplier performance to ensure appropriate inventory and stock management
• Provides you the ability to analyze and adapt new and advanced marketing and ecommerce strategies and customer buying capabilities
• Perform market share analysis and market research to support marketing, sales and targets
• Enhance your category management
• Compile and analyze brand and marketing research
• Perform Integration and analyze information from key performance metrics such as financial data, inventory, etc., and CRM systems with unlined integration of various formats and stunning reports and graphics providing accessibility across the enterprise in every location with integration and information sharing, collaboration and consistency irrespective of the location of the users
• Design effective marketing campaigns for specific products by identifying opportunities
• Gather and analyze data to determine appropriate stock and inventory levels to meet demand and avoid overstock or shortages
• Enhance you financial performance and enables the user to monitor the financial health of the organization and create and share reports to comply with government and industry regulations

For more information on Business Intelligence for retail industry or any other industry queries please click here

Managers and analysts in the manufacturing industry who are involved in reviewing metrics such as production capability, planning production schedule based on their current inventories should ensure that the availability of the raw material for their production unit is abundant and make right decisions on plant reallocation for manufacturing their product when required. . This amount of planning requires a basic analysis and an advanced analysis that will help to optimize their production. A basic analysis includes real time status of plant utilization and an analysis of the advanced market demand trends versus the amount of production done by the unit. While an advanced analysis includes analysis of commodities used in the production, a detailed forecast on the output of the production machine and additive programming to optimize production resources.

Following business area are prime areas of concern for manufacturers:

• Manufacturers need to have a bird’s eye-view of their customer information that will help the sales team to coordinate and collaborate their customer interactions.
• Improve customer satisfaction.
• Lead time to fulfill customer orders across sales and distribution channels.
• Improve “order promising” (i.e., when a customer is promised delivery or issue resolution) through analysis of historical statistics, expected lead time, and inventory levels
• Analysis of usage of products to go for new range of products.
• Predict and prepare inventory and production levels.
• Benchmark distributors, and geographies against each other in an attempt to foster increased attention to goals and metrics, as well as reward high performers and aid underachievers.

To overcome they need to maintain optimum level of inventory so as to avoid overstock / short-supply and bring innovative and profitable schemes at marketing level. Business Intelligence is the right tool that will helps in achieving this.

BI can also be used to increase the flexibility and speed of operational reporting.

• Quickly generate established reports
• Easily create ad-hoc reports
• Isolate specific problems
• Analyze data across multiple systems
• Integrate new data sources

BI helps manufacturers a better visibility of their financial performance and the insight and understanding to improve it i.e., it provides the solutions for cost and profitability analytics and solutions for operational planning and budgeting. Being able to quickly assess the impact of internal and external changes, BI helps such companies become more agile and better able to keep the bottom line on track.

BI helps managers to be equipped with state-of-the art and exact information to take critical business decisions rather than going on assumptions of a situation.

BI helps to improve communication across increasingly complex manufacturing supply chains, while satisfying customer demands for new products and product enhancements.

How BI helps companies in the Manufacturing Sector:

• Increase the value of customer relationships
• Respond quickly to changing markets and company sensitivities
• Accelerate new product time-to-market
• Reduce inventory investment
• Improve planning, scheduling, and the procurement schedule
• Maintain and develop quality assurance
• Select and apply world-class technologies

For more information and to find how your company  can get benefited by BI, Please click here