Keys to Success in Your BI Projects
This article continues with a discussion of the positive results from a successful business intelligence project.
Executives and management consultants agree that effective business process management involves pushing day-to-day decisions down to the line-of-business operations managers. This level of BI supports that by giving them access to information and tools that help them make decisions that improve the performance of their business.
The chief benefit of moving operating decisions to this level is that it improves the quality and speed of the decisions. Making that move through new business intelligence can lead to several business benefits.
Examples of Successful BI projects
There are many ways that business intelligence can improve overall business efficiency. For example, you can increase revenue by using BI to create a more effective product mix, optimize distribution techniques or find better marketing partners. Business intelligence can enable you to manage target marketing programs better by being able to measure the responsiveness of various segments and recalibrating more quickly and precisely as you react to changes in demand.
You can control costs by using BI to reduce waste and scrap and to increase the productivity of materials and labor by keeping track of the total percentage yield of products that are manufactured correctly the first time without scrap or rework. You can find and evaluate less costly manufacturing partners or parts suppliers and determine how to utilize plant capacities more fully by tracking manufacturing cost and capacity utilization (how much of the total manufacturing output capacity is being utilized at a given point in time).
You can improve customer service by using operational business intelligence to create a more responsive call center operation by tracking customer satisfaction through fill and return rates, or more responsive restocking programs by tracking inventory levels. BI can help you bring new products to market more quickly or to clear inventory in a profitable way by keeping track of WIP inventory/turns, which measures the efficiciency of inventory use by dividing the cost of goods sold by the average inventory used to produce those goods. You can also track inventory levels in order to optimize shelf space to maximize product exposure at lower costs.
Using InetSoft's user-friendly dashboard software, business users can create dashboards to explore data on a whole new level and meet any business needs. Data can be integrated into interactive visuals such as charts, tables, and crosstabs that allow for data exploration and drill-down in order to discover new trends and increase efficiency. There are unlimited business intelligence project ideas that are possible, which means that unlimited business queries can be answered.
Key Features of a Successful BI Project
A combination of modern technology and careful management can remove barriers that stand in the way of a successful business intelligence project. The technology for new business intelligence projects is similar to old BI systems in that it gathers and presents information to users, but it is different in a few areas. New BI has to serve more and less technically oriented users, be more responsive to ad-hoc requests and be able to add new sources of data quickly as business models and product mixes change. Some key features of InetSoft's BI system are:
- A powerful and flexible data acquisition system. Access key data in real time and other data manually or automatically.
- Flexibility. The ability to drill down into data, to change the type of graphic being used, and to move column tables around.
- Increased self-service for users. With a shallow learning curve and a user-friendly interface, there is no need to rely on IT. Anyone with basic Excel skills can create powerful dashboards.
- Interactivity. Users can access data on their screens quickly and manipulate it as soon as they need to without having to wait on IT to make changes.
In addition to direct benefits such as those cited above, there are indirect benefits to new BI. The nature of this approach requires and facilitates greater intra-company and inter-partnership collaboration and integration, not just of data but of operations. That collaboration in turn can produce further discoveries about how to operate the business better.
But the bottom line is of course the bottom line: new BI improves organizational performance by expanding and localizing decision-making capability, eliminating latency, enabling collaboration and improving access to siloed data, all of which will significantly improve business performance.
Click here to view more examples of successful business intelligence projects made with InetSoft's dashboard software.
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