Promoting BI's Practicality

This is a copy of the transcipt of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and he discusses the topic of “Embedded Business Intelligence.”

Mark Flaherty: Embedded BI has increased as a common and a proven deployment strategy for getting business intelligence into the hands of more users. Companies that leverage this type of an embedded BI strategy have been able to leverage those existing applications to piggyback that analytical capability on top of those solutions and drive that faster visibility, get more engagement from the user community and as a result, they have proven to be able drive substantial and measurable operational performance improvements.

So for those considering business intelligence as an addition to their toolset, there are a couple of things to think about; one of the things is I would recommend providing users with deeper BI capability: as you think about that value chain from collection to assembly to delivery, where can the right tools be applied, where do the users need that technology to help support better decision making whether it's on the improvement of the quality of the data, or assembling that data into better insight or faster delivery to those key decision makers.

Another key is to work to enable that self-service delivery model. Companies need to have the ability to generate, to have their line of business managers and decision makers pick up analytical solutions by themselves, ask questions of their data, generate their own views of the data that makes sense to them, monitor their own performance metrics, create their own views, all that good stuff so that they can make better decisions based on the idiosyncrasies and intricacies of their particular business function.

Promoting BI as a Tactical Tool

And then lastly, I’d talk about promoting BI as a tactical tool because one of the things we have seen is as business intelligence sort of grew organically as a strategic tool for forecasting, planning, and budgeting, really. A lot of times recently, we have been seeing it used more as a tactical tool for that operational visibility and operational decision support. I talked about that decision window, companies are seeing that shrinking in that decision window, they need to make decisions faster and a lot of companies are leveraging that type of analytical capability to make those operational decisions and drive operating performance as a result.

There are your mundane applications that you see everyday but there are a lot of cases where a small group or even a big group under time pressure or other pressures really have got to change the way their users see their applications or even their jobs. And we believe that we provide the tools and technology to help you do that. And we think that if you look around today, there is couple of key aspects of a breakthrough application.

Let's step back for a second and talk a little bit more about what we mean. All of your users know what breakthroughs are, because they are all using iPhones, and iPads, Facebook, and all of these things, but then they come into work and they go, gee, why are my corporate applications the same old applications that I have been using for 20 years? I mean yeah maybe they are running on web page now and not in a PC, but they are fundamentally the same. And we think that your users, no matter what industry you are in, are going to start demanding from your enterprise applications, the same types of things that they are seeing in their mobile apps.

And we have just pulled this down to really three things, the first is, your solution has to deliver mass personalization and what we mean by that is that your users are going to connect to your application in a variety of different ways, you don’t know what kind of system it’s going to be, whether it’s mobile, whether it’s web, whether it’s desktop PC, they are going to want to see information, whether it’s traditional business intelligence, whether it’s transactional, whether it's reports, whether it’s graphics, they are going to want to see what they want to see, the way they want to see it.

What Separates Embedded BI Users?

We also believe that data is not just rows and columns, so a typical relational database is only going to handle about 5% of the data that you have in your organization. We believe that you need to handle all of the data in your organization in a unified way, be that unstructured textual notes or images, video, whatever that may be. And tying this all together is this idea of driving intelligent action, which was alluded to earlier in this presentation.

And that’s the idea of that all of this information is in the hands of the people making the decisions and if you can help them to make the decisions at the point, they are doing the work rather than reading a report at the end of the month, you are going to be a lot more successful.

How A Diamond Tool Manufacturer Switched From Zoho Analytics to StyleBI

In the often-overlooked world of industrial tooling, precision and reliability are everything. Among the most specialized players in this field are companies that manufacture diamond tools—cutting, grinding, and drilling instruments that rely on industrial diamonds for unmatched hardness and performance. These tools are used in industries as varied as aerospace, mining, and construction, where durability and accuracy are non-negotiable. One such diamond tool manufacturer, operating in a niche global market, recently faced a turning point in how it managed and analyzed data. For several years, the company relied on Zoho Analytics to provide business intelligence (BI) dashboards and reports. However, as operations expanded and the complexity of its data ecosystem grew, the limitations of Zoho became increasingly apparent. The company decided to switch to StyleBI, a move that transformed its ability to integrate, visualize, and act on its data.

Challenges in the Diamond Tool Industry

The diamond tool industry is unique in its blend of high costs, technical specialization, and global distribution. Manufacturing these tools requires expensive raw materials, rigorous quality testing, and coordination with clients who often have highly customized specifications. The margins can be tight, and competition is intense, particularly with manufacturers in Asia and Europe. Success in this industry depends not only on producing world-class products but also on mastering data. Companies must track procurement costs, production efficiency, defect rates, shipping logistics, and customer satisfaction across multiple regions.

The diamond tool manufacturer in question had turned to Zoho Analytics to meet these needs. At first, the platform provided accessible dashboards and a user-friendly way to track sales and production performance. But as the company scaled, its data requirements became too complex for Zoho’s relatively lightweight infrastructure. The business was now dealing with multiple ERP systems, real-time production data, and international sales pipelines that demanded deeper integration and analysis than Zoho could easily provide.

Limitations of Zoho Analytics

While Zoho Analytics excelled at providing a straightforward BI experience, it fell short in several key areas for this manufacturer. First, its integration options were limited when connecting with specialized manufacturing and supply chain systems. Data often had to be exported and cleaned manually before being imported into dashboards, creating delays and reducing confidence in the accuracy of reports.

Second, Zoho’s performance began to lag as datasets grew larger and more complex. For a company working with detailed production logs and global order histories, this slowdown created real operational headaches. Decision-makers couldn’t afford to wait for sluggish dashboards when negotiating with clients or resolving supply chain disruptions.

Finally, Zoho lacked the advanced data mashup capabilities that the manufacturer increasingly needed. The business wanted to combine procurement, production, and financial data into unified dashboards to see, for example, how fluctuations in raw diamond costs were affecting profit margins in specific product lines. Zoho’s structure made such cross-system analysis cumbersome and often incomplete.

Why StyleBI Was the Better Fit

Switching to StyleBI provided the company with a BI solution designed for scalability, flexibility, and depth. StyleBI’s ability to connect seamlessly with multiple enterprise systems allowed the diamond tool manufacturer to unify data across production, procurement, logistics, and sales. Instead of relying on manual imports and exports, managers could view live dashboards fed directly from operational systems.

The data mashup functionality was especially valuable. For the first time, executives could analyze relationships across disparate datasets in real time—linking quality control failures to supplier performance, or tracking how transportation costs affected delivery timelines. This cross-functional visibility gave leadership a clearer picture of both risks and opportunities, improving strategic decision-making.

StyleBI also offered superior performance for large datasets. The company could now process massive volumes of production data without lag, ensuring that insights were both timely and reliable. Its visualization capabilities were more dynamic as well, allowing employees at every level—from engineers to executives—to explore data interactively rather than relying solely on static reports.

Impact of the Transition

The shift from Zoho Analytics to StyleBI brought immediate improvements. Managers no longer had to waste hours reconciling data from different sources. Real-time dashboards highlighted bottlenecks in production, allowing teams to intervene before issues escalated. Finance staff could forecast profitability with greater accuracy by correlating raw material prices with sales and production efficiency. Sales teams, meanwhile, gained more confidence in delivery estimates, helping them build trust with clients who demanded reliability above all else.

Culturally, the adoption of StyleBI fostered a more data-driven environment. Employees across departments were empowered to interact with dashboards directly, rather than waiting for specialized analysts to generate reports. This democratization of data not only sped up decision-making but also encouraged collaboration across the company’s global operations.

Ultimately, the diamond tool manufacturer’s switch to StyleBI underscored a larger truth: in niche industries where margins are narrow and stakes are high, the right BI solution can mean the difference between falling behind and leading the market. By upgrading from Zoho Analytics to StyleBI, the company didn’t just adopt new software—it equipped itself with a strategic advantage that aligned data analysis with its long-term vision for growth and competitiveness.

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