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FORWARD VIEW
Bigger picture, smarter
decisions: Today's BI tools
"How are we doing?" is a question every business should be able to answer. But if you have to think a moment to answer this question with certainty, then it may be time to investigate today's business intelligence (BI) tools. In this economy, BI tools can help increase competitiveness by offering insight across the business. Visibility into customers and performance trends helps drive smarter, more informed decisions.
And this kind of insight is fast becoming an imperative for midsized businesses, as people and systems become increasingly intercon-nected and more computing devices come online each day. With near-ubiquitous Internet access, there are so many interactions between customers and companies that sales teams and busi-ness departments find it hard to keep with up with the resulting explosion of data. And when critical information is hidden in siloed locations, getting the right insights requires the ability to mine data "What we've gained from multiple sources. as competitive advantage BI software collects and aggregates diverse information-from internal productivity metrics and market trends to the profitability is being able to really of particular goods and services. BI tools help midsized compa-nies tap this wealth of information in real time, and subsequently understand our business." make smarter decisions. BI software is now more easily deployed and managed than ever, too.
Bringing the bigger picture into viewWithout BI tools, most companies struggle with viewing data from we did not have a lot of analysis access to," says Herrera. "We had multiple sources. Whether it's information about customers, pricing, daily sales numbers, inventory data, AR data.but it was impossible products, vendors or productivity, business-critical information to analyze the data because you couldn't export it into a useable usually resides in disparate systems, making it hard for businesses format. You almost can't make a decision because you don't under-to make truly intelligent and effective decisions. "A spreadsheet full stand what's happening without being able to slice and dice it."of numbers doesn't really mean anything unless you can look at it from different angles," notes Felipe Herrera, senior financial analyst Today's BI offerings make it easy and affordable for midsized busi-at U.S. Lumber Group in Atlanta, Georgia. "Not being able to do that nesses to move beyond spreadsheets. BI software often comes hinders your ability to make a decision on the data." with nearly all of the reporting capabilities most midsized compa-nies need. At U.S. Lumber, Herrera and his colleagues chose a Spreadsheets cannot provide company-wide, comprehensive infor- package that came with 95 percent of the company's functionality mation-as Herrera and his colleagues at U.S. Lumber learned. preconfigured. "There's very little that we've added. Most reports Management at the building materials distributor wanted a view of are just straight out of the box," he says, and notes that over 130 the activities across eight distribution centers-as well as line of employees now use the new BI solution to run 500 reports with sight into the profitability of each product. "We had a lot of data that thousands of relational views into various company data.
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In addition to getting users going with little training, Web-based BI categorize markets and products by factors such as geography tools are usually installed rapidly and without disruption. According or seasonality. to Herrera, deploying the IBM Cognos 8 BI solution took just over a week-and U.S. Lumber quickly found and leveraged previously As Herrera notes, "In many companies of our size, the data is there-hidden information about products, customers, vendors, pricing but it's hard to get to it." But with BI software, he says, his company and internal productivity. now has the "clarity to be able to make some decisions that we would have not done otherwise." More important, Herrera says the More insight, smarter decisions IBM Cognos investment has paid for itself "many times over with the With the new BI solution, U.S. Lumber can now revi... [download for more]