Page 40 - Mega Bridal Issue

Business Intelligence Key performance indicators are different for each company and
even different for each role within a company. It could include
hidden costs that need to be considered when calculating profit
By Bill Edmett and loss. It could be your current inventory, or bottle-necks in your
supply chain. Perhaps your success depends on knowing current
trends in consumer demand for your product or service; what’s
hot and what’s not: Knowing what’s profitable or, causing losses
by actually costing you more than you’re getting back in revenue.
It’s amazing but many businesses don’t find out that they’re losing
money on an item until it’s too late.

The benefit of Business Intelligence is being empowered to make
decisions that lead to success
What is Business Intel-
ligence (or BI)? It’s more In 1999 Bill Gates discussed in his book, “Business @ the Speed
than just a buzz-word in of Thought,” how business and technology should be integrated
Information Technology. to provide an edge on the competition. Just the title of the book
implies a vision where you, as a business decision maker, with
Simply stated, Business effective Information Technology can be empowered to make effec-
Intelligence means making tive decisions based on good analysis with accurate data, and in
smart business decisions turn gain an advantage over the competition.
based on good data. According to Wikipedia, BI mainly refers to computer-based
techniques used in
identifying, extracting,
and analyzing busi-
ness data such as sales
revenue by products
and/or departments, or
by associated costs and
incomes.
BI technologies pro-
vide historical, current
and predictive views of
business operations.
Common functions of
Business Intelligence
technologies are report-
ing, online analytical
processing, analytics,
data mining, process
mining, complex event
processing, business
performance manage-
ment, benchmarking,
text mining and predic-
tive analytics.
There is a myth that
Business Intelligence is
only for large business:
Although in the recent
past, the technology was
expensive and typically
implemented by large businesses. But now the technology can be
The very idea in itself is simple and elegant. And after all, doesn’t applied for small to medium sized business too. In fact, you can in-
every business person already know it’s an essential key to suc- tegrate low cost finance and accounting software like Peachtree or
cess? But there are challenges related to having immediate QuickBooks with low cost databases like Microsoft Access or SQL
access to reliably accurate information. And that’s what Business Server Express, which is free (thank you Microsoft).
Intelligence is all about: It aims to support better business decision- There is low cost software like LogMeIn.com that will enable you to
making. Thus the technology has also been referred to as Decision log in to your company’s BI system.
Support Sciences (DSS). With the Internet, and a competent ASP.Net developer (Active
Server Pages, which is a programming technology and is free from
A Business Intelligence system will typically include applications Microsoft), your business data can be made available anywhere
(software programs) that will identify the right data, extract and you can get online. Because of decreasing computer costs, renting
analyze it for you, and then present it in a way that makes sense data storage space on reliable secure servers maintained by data
to you. It may be presented in the form of reports, spreadsheets, hosting companies, a small business can definitely gain a great
graphs, or in some form of a “digital dashboard” that displays key deal of benefit by implementing some form of Business Intelligence.
performance indicators that are critical to your company. Like a And of course you can market on the Internet.
vehicle gas gauge helps you decide when it’s time to fill up,