telephone:InetSoft Tools & Technology: What Is Self-Service BI?
This is a transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in August 2010 entitled "Why Self-Service BI?" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.
AssetPoint Case Study
AssetPoint, a leading provider of (EAM) Enterprise Asset Management and (CMMS) Computerized Maintenance Management Software solutions chose InetSoft in order to offer KPI dashboards and advanced analytics to craftsmen and maintenance managers.
Clients receive out-of-the-box interactive dashboards and an optional upgrade that provides dashboard development and data mashup tools to create integrated views of other data sources within the organization. AssetPoint's TabWare EAM/CMMS is an easy-to-use solution for managing all processes of maintaining industrial equipment and the operational facilities of any organization.
AssetPoint users span many industries including Manufacturing, Mining, Oil and Gas, Food and Beverage, and Facilities Maintenance. With a single platform users can manage assets, maintenance work schedules, and spare parts to maximize asset performance, control costs, and improve operations.
Eleven key performance indicators are monitored in the primary operational dashboard that is powered by InetSoft such as equipment downtime, maintenance backlog, and MRO inventory as a percentage of equipment replacement value. The KPI dashboard helps customers quickly spot areas of concern and drill down to the details. With the optional upgrade, users can build any type of performance management dashboard and perform visual analysis on any data.
Additionally, any maintenance-related data stored in the TabWare solution can be mashed up with relevant enterprise data, whether it is stored in a data warehouse, departmental, operational or financial systems, and even spreadsheets created by individuals or vendors. Interactive dashboards include intuitive point-and-click controls like filter lists, range sliders, and drop-down boxes which allow for deep data exploration and thorough ad hoc reporting and analysis.
AssetPoint found InetSoft Technology's dashboard interface a great match for the TabWare EAM/CMMS solution. TabWare is easy to learn and easy to use, meaning customers can be up and running quickly and thus realizing its benefits sooner. The company found InetSoft dashboards similarly user friendly, while giving detailed information at a quick glance. The ability to drill-down into each metric has given managers powerful information quickly.
Mark Flaherty (MF): Traditionally most business users have had to rely heavily on IT to get access to information the need to make business decisions. This not only causes inordinate delays in decision-making, but also places extra dependencies on IT. This has increased the overall cost of business intelligence. All of these factors translate into higher operating costs, reduced productivity, customer dissatisfaction, and most importantly a higher level of dissatisfaction among employees of an organization, both in IT and in the business.
To maximize competiveness, enterprises have to adopt ways in which business users can quickly and easily get the required information. So self-service BI describes a business intelligence environment in which business users can get rich, right, and real information as easily as they get information from a Google search. In other words, it has to be as intuitive and quick to get results as the common Internet search engine.
For this to happen, in an ideal world, business and IT need to work together to create a self-service BI environment that enables business users to access information with close to zero support from IT for their day to day operations. Naturally doing this increases the overall ROI of a BI implementation.
The need for such self-service BI has become less of an aspiration and more of a requirement in today’s world. We are definitely seeing a trend towards self-service BI. It really is important that IT can focus on other critical issues while the users can just access information independently.
Why are we seeing the trends towards self-service BI?
Most large organizations have multiple, inconsistent BI applications. And a single data warehouse does not adequately cover the needs of all lines of business. This is because the data warehouse was developed independently in a departmental silo. This prevents business users from have access to consolidated business data and metrics.
In fact, in many large enterprises, one single data warehouse would not be able to meet the needs of the entire company. If a single data warehouse does not adequately cover all lines of business, then users will have to combine data from different sources and consolidate them on their own, usually in a spreadsheet, which leads to several spreadmarts within the same organization.
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