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"SAP Americas is a subsidiary of SAP AG, the world's largest business software company and the third-largest software supplier overall.
SAP Americas' corporate headquarters is located in Newtown Square, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia."
Source : SAP
Why Midsize Companies Need Business Intelligence Solutions in This Uncertain Global Economy
Business Intelligence Solutions is also known as :
Business Intelligence Solutions,
Business Intelligence,
Trusted Business Intelligence,
Identify Business Trends,
Custom Digital Dashboards,
Top 4 BI Worst Practices,
Provide Business Intelligence Solutions,
Data Analytics and Reporting Solutions,
Unifying Performance Management Business Intelligence,
Business Intelligence Provides,
Business Intelligence Solutions Improve Performance,
Traditional Business Intelligence,
Data Warehousing Business Intelligence,
Strategic Intelligence Reports Analysis,
Business Intelligence Analytics,
OLAP Business Intelligence,
On-demand Business Intelligence,
Business Intelligence Dashboards,
Business Intelligence Applications,
Business Intelligence Solutions Enterprises,
Reporting Business Intelligence,
Business Intelligence Solutions Bring,
Mid-market Business Intelligence Solutions,
Businessobjects Business Intelligence,
Scientific Business Intelligence Solutions,
Strategic Intelligence Reports,
Business Solutions Provide Reporting,
Business Intelligence Technology,
Operational Business Intelligence,
IT Business Intelligence Solution,
On-demand Business Intelligence Solutions,
Business Intelligence Practices,
Management Business Intelligence,
Smart Business Intelligence Solutions,
Predictive Analytics,
BI Reporting Software.
Without a business intelligence information infrastructure in place, midsize companies
are more likely to exceed budgets, miss deadlines, improve performance of one department
at the expense of the overall business, and reward employees for actions that do
not improve performance. Ultimately, without BI, the current economic downturn poses
greater risk to their business operations.
Content
- Executive Summary
- The Hazards of Working Without BI
- How BI Can Benefit Midsize Companies
- Broad Tools and Functionality
- What to look for in a BI Solution
- Flexible and Robust Functiionality
- Simplicity is the Key
- Transparent Access to Data and Business Applications
- Secure Operations
- Low TCO
Executive Summary
In today's economy, executives face
declining revenues and tough costcutting
decisions. However, cost
reductions alone are not enough to
survive in this market, especially for
midsize companies, which typically
lack the expansive resources needed
to sustain a market downturn, yet have
the ability to be much more agile with
the right information. Midsize organizations
require clear visibility into operations
and processes, so they can
quickly capitalize on what works well,
rapidly identify and address the issues
that degrade performance and efficiency,
and optimize their use of resources.
In addition, companies must base decisions
on fact rather than guesswork.
Finally, they need to ensure greater
alignment and accountability across all
employees, so business performance
is maximized within the allocated plans
and budgets.
These are all admirable goals. However,
most midsize companies don't have the
information infrastructure in place to
meet such requirements. Without a
vital information infrastructure that is
informed by business intelligence (BI),
midsize organizations are in a precarious
spot. Consider:
- Lacking insight to operational inefficiencies,
they take longer to identify
and address issues that affect
performance
- Lacking visibility across the enterprise,
they have difficulty coordinating
activities across departments,
divisions, partners, and customers
- Lacking depth of analysis, they
miss seeing abnormal variances
and understanding root causes that
have material impact on earnings
- They tend to perform worse than
their peers in making the most of
their resources
Without a BI information infrastructure
in place, midsize companies are more
likely to exceed budgets, miss deadlines,
improve performance of one
department at the expense of the
overall business, and reward employees
for actions that do not improve
performance. Ultimately, without BI,
the current economic downturn poses
greater risk to their business operations.
This paper examines how midsize companies
can tap into the strength of BI
to reinforce what works in their organizations,
and position them to move
forward even as the economy falters.
"Business intelligence
has helped us create
better controls and
enabled managers to run
their part of the operations
more effectively
and efficiently."
FreshDirect
The Hazards Of Working Without BI
BI is especially important for midsize companies, who
typically do not have the vast resources of an industry
giant but often have the agility to implement significant
business decisions quickly. BI helps to ensure that those
quick decisions are correct. Since fact-based decisions
are likely to enrich a company's bottom-line, a midsize
organization using BI to illuminate decision-making can
gain significant competitive advantage ' during good
times, as well as during challenging economic times.
"As companies brace themselves for a
recession, investing in business intelligence
(BI) software might well be their
best defense."
heina, Madan. "Business Intelligence: A Bull in a Bear Economy," Ovum, December 2008.
The lack of a good information infrastructure
at a midsize company is
visible through the following notable
hazards:
- Multiple versions of the truth '
Interdepartmental meetings can frequently
turn into finger-pointing exercises,
as various spreadsheets used
by individual managers use different
assumptions and carry different data,
making it hard to make decisions. As
a result, decisions often are made on
instinct rather than fact.
- Misaligned action across the
organization ' Information residing in
departmental silos cannot be easily
shared. This problem, combined with
multiple versions of the truth, leads
to departmental initiatives not being
aligned with each other, as well as
with the overall company strategy.
- Difficulty prioritizing ' Without the
ability to calculate and determine the
future impact of any problem that surfaces,
executives have limited ability
to prioritize. As a result, all problems,
minor and major, get equal attention.
- Inability to perform in-depth
analysis ' Managers lack a consistent,
accurate, and quick way of
quantifying facts, such as determining
who are their most profitable
customers, which products are losing
money, and which business processes
are inefficient.
- Not knowing where to concentrate
efforts ' Uncovering hidden issues,
identifying their scope, and determining
their potential impact through
what-if scenarios can enable executives
to address problems proactively,
before they balloon out of control and
hurt the business. Yet without a good
information infrastructure, often,
by the time executives become
aware of problems, the issues have
progressed to a full-blown firestorm.
- Inability to measure departmental
performance ' Although executives
may set four or five performance
metrics for each of their departments,
they have no clear, consistent, and
efficient way to calculate and compare
performance across various
periods; instead, obtaining such
information requires the accounting
department to crunch multiple
spreadsheets over the weekend.
- Unable to locate important information
' Managers are told that certain
reports on product, process, and
customer performance have been
posted to the company's intranet,
but they have no quick way of
finding them.
How BI Can Benefit Midsize Companies
BI provides the tools that help
organizations understand, analyze,
and even predict what's occurring
within their company. Organizations
can use BI to turn data into useful and
meaningful information, and then distribute
this intelligence to those who need
it, when they need it ' so every employee
makes timely, better-informed decisions.
Using BI , organizations can
combine data from a wide variety of
sources to see an integrated, up-todate,
360-degree view of the business.
Uniting operations and analysis, BI
helps the entire organization make
better decisions. As a result,
organizations are better positioned
to address the hazards listed above,
leading to improved visibility of the
business, correct alignment of action
and strategy, and better resource
utilization. BI is especially important
for midsize companies, who typically
do not have the vast resources of an
industry giant but often have the agility
to implement significant business
decisions quickly. BI helps to ensure
that those quick decisions are correct.
Since fact-based decisions are likely
to enrich a company's bottom-line, a
midsize organization using BI to
illuminate decision-making can gain
significant competitive advantage '
during good times, as well as during
challenging economic times.
Broad Tools and Functionality
The BI spectrum is very broad in terms
of tools and functionality. At its core
are enterprise reporting and ad hoc
query and analysis. Data integration
and data quality functionality complements
core reporting functionality by
consolidating and validating data from
multiple sources to ensure accurate,
consistent data. Adding dashboards to
the mix, users can quickly visualize and
understand key trends and issues within
their environments. Packaged analytic
solutions may also include scorecards
and performance management offerings,
for monitoring business metrics
and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Common KPIs include customer
satisfaction, profitability, and sales
per employee. Scorecards and
performance management helps organizations
better align individual and
departmental metrics and efforts with
strategic goals. In addition, packaged
analytic applications include planning
and budgeting functionality, as well as
consolidation.
Enterprise or production reporting typically
involves high-volume, high-resolution
reports that are run on a regular
basis. Enterprise reports may be used
to generate, for example, customer
statements, invoices, or individualized
benefit summaries for each employee.
In one scenario, a sales manager's
report shows monthly sales and associated
sales commissions sorted by
salesperson and then by customer.
Report distribution is controlled so
that each sales manager can only
see entries for his or her salespeople.
Report producers may choose to
e-mail reports or place them on an
internal Web site for viewing through
a Web browser.
Ad hoc functionality puts the power of
reporting in the hands of the individual.
For example, with ad hoc query functionality,
you can access your organization's
data, asking questions such as:
- What were my most profitable
sales to customer ABC Corporation
last quarter?
- What is the current average salary
of employees within band 3, and
how has it been trending?
- H ow much of part 123 do we have
in inventory and what products use
that part?
In addition to ad hoc functionally, most
query tools also include simple reporting
functionality. For example, they can
be used to generate a simple report
that lists the accrued vacation of all
employees, sorted and totaled by
department.
BI also offers advanced analysis techniques,
enabling decision makers to
view data across multiple classifications
or dimensions (for example, product,
customer, location, time-period,
salesperson, and so on). They can then
slice-and-dice the data to look at various
combinations, such as viewing the
sales in each region for the previous
marketing campaign, or determining
which products each customer purchased
last year. Your organization
could define hierarchies so that sales
could first be viewed for each region.
The user could then drill down to view
the sales in each state or country in
each region, and drill down further to
view the sales of each store within
each state or country. Such granularity
make it easy to compare the results
from one time period with another, so
you could compare this month's total
sales of a product with the same month
last year ' while allowing the user to
drill down and perform year-over-year
comparisons at levels, such as by
store, by customer, or by salesperson.
Filtering features can be used to
include or exclude specific stores,
regions, products, salespeople, or
time-periods in the analysis ' and give
you the ability to segment products,
stores, or salespeople according to
performance ' best, worst, top 25,
and so on.
When communicating complex operations
data and business scenarios, a
picture is worth a thousand words '
or, in this case, numbers. Dashboards
contain highly graphical techniques that
strongly complement query and reporting.
Using graphical gauges analogous
to an automobile dashboard and
symbols such as traffic lights, where
red represents an alert condition and
yellow a warning, executives, operations
gurus, financial analysts, and other
business users can quickly identify
exception conditions.
It has often been said, "If you can't
measure it, you can't manage it."
Scorecards and other performance
management tools enable executives
to establish business metrics for their
teams, update and monitor results,
and communicate results as appropriate
so that minor problems can be identified
early-on and corrective action
quickly taken.
Dashboards are commonly used to display
performance metrics and allow
users to drill down from the visual
image to view the underlying detail.
When displaying information, dashboards
may have to source data from
several operational systems. Data integration
technology within BI systems
greatly simplifies the integration process,
helping to pull relevant information
from various systems.
BI is not just about tools and their applications;
it is also concerned with distribution
and control. You should be able
to publish reports to the Web and deliver
them to a user's preferred mobile
device, if appropriate. However, not
every employee should have access to
every report or analysis. Hence, administration,
monitoring, security, and control
are also part of the BI environment.
What to Look for in a BI Solution
Effective BI solutions should contain
the following functionality:
- Enterprise and operational reporting,
ad hoc analysis, and dashboards
- Flexibility and ease of use, so you
can augment and create reports and
dashboards, with little IT support
- Access to information through Microsoft
Excel or Microsoft Word, as well
as Web portals
- Security controls for information
access
- Low total cost of ownership (TCO),
while supporting growth into more
sophisticated data quality and data
warehousing needs
- Visibility for the entire organization,
whether through desktop deployment,
the Web, or mobile devices
Flexible and Robust Functionality
Your BI solution should allow you to
create, manage, and deliver packaged
reports; perform ad hoc reporting, query,
and analysis; and deploy interactive
dashboards. Your solution should support
a transition to fact-based decision
making and help accelerate your company's
growth and success.
Simplicity Is Key
Your BI solution should make it easy for
you to create or modify packaged and
ad hoc reports, queries, and dashboards
in order to obtain key operational
and business insights from business
applications. Ease of use is essential
for any midsize company, since IT
resources are limited. Furthermore,
information for certain analytics may
reside in locations other than your
SA P® application, such as spreadsheets,
email systems or other databases.
An efficient BI solution makes it
easy to incorporate external information
into reports, while hiding the complexity
of accessing multi-sourced
information.
Transparent Access to Data and
Business Applications
Worldwide, many organizations continue
to use Microsoft Excel to analyze
their business and Microsoft Word to
create documents. Thus, they want to
ensure that their BI solution can bring
the most current information from their
transactional system into Microsoft
Office applications on their laptops and
desktops ' and do it transparently.
Such functionality can significantly
enhance the productivity and effectiveness
of all business users. In addition,
organizations that have created portals
for their employees want to ensure that
any BI reports, queries, and dashboards
can be easily accessed from
such portals.
The underlying technology within the packaged solution
for midsize companies is designed to make it easy for business
users to develop and use analytics without relying on
the IT department. Users have complete flexibility in how
they access, format, and interact with their data.
Secure Operations
Organizations also want to ensure that
sensitive data is only accessed by the
appropriate recipients. They need to
able to specify which roles within the
organization can see specific information
within their BI solution.
Low TCO
Midsize companies have limited
resources, so an ideal BI solution will
ensure low cost of ownership through
off-the-shelf integrations, and the use
of templates to simplify and accelerate
the creation of custom reports, queries,
and dashboards without the need
to hire expensive outside consultants.
The BI solution also should have relevant
components embedded within the
solution to reduce the need to buy
additional software.
"Companies now realize
they can get more out of
the data assets they have
collected. The growth is
also a reflection of the
fact that IT systems in
the midmarket are quite
mature."
Forrester Research
SAP BusinessObjects™ BI Solutions
SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI solutions
are designed and packaged to be
affordable for any midmarket company.
With the SA P BusinessObjects Edge
BI software, you can:w
- Create, manage, and deliver standard
and ad hoc reports
- Leverage ad hoc reporting, query,
and analysis features
- Perform what-if analysis using interactive
dashboards
- Deploy complete data quality and
data mart solutions with minimal
total cost of ownership
- Ensure secure, role-appropriate
access to data
Through an intuitive point-and-click
Web interface on top of a built-in online
analytical processing (OLAP) engine,
your business users can access the
data they want and analyze it. With
dashboards, they can interact with visual
sliders and gauges to quickly identify
new opportunities and challenges. They
can use what-if analysis to understand
the impact of decisions before they are
made. For existing SA P customers,
comprehensive security features use
the SAP security model to ensure that
users can only view and access the
data they have the rights to access.
With an SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI
software solution that is integrated with
Microsoft Office and Microsoft Share-
Point, the information from your existing
transactional systems can be viewed
live, in real time, by the users within
these solutions. Thus, incorporating
the most current data into presentations,
spreadsheets, and documents
is simple.
The SAP BusinessObjects solution
gives you the flexibility to deliver
reports, either on demand or at a prescheduled
time, via e-mail, print, or by
saving to a shared directory on the
server. The solution also supports an
offline viewer, which allows users to
review reports when they are disconnected
from the network, such as when
they are in client meetings or traveling
on business. As a result, users can
always stay in touch with their business
wherever they are.
The underlying technology within the
packaged solution for midsize companies
is designed to make it easy for
business users to develop and use BI
without relying on the IT department.
Users have complete flexibility in how
they access, format, and interact with
their data. Out-of-the-box integration
with SA P Business All-in-One solutions
and the SA P NetWeaver® Business
Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW)
component allows users to create ad
hoc reports, queries, and analytics on
top of SA P transactional data. The
package is also designed to enable
business users to access data from
non-SA P sources, such as spreadsheets,
real-time data feeds, log files,
or any ODBC/JDBC compliant database,
while hiding the complexity of
accessing such data. Because the
complexity is hidden, your business
users can create and access sophisticated
analytics without any IT help. In
addition, the SA P BusinessObjects
portfolio of solutions contains quickstart
packs and a repository of components
such as business views, graphics,
and formulas, all of which
accelerate the development of
analytics.
Offering BI Solutions For
Midsize Companies
SAP offers a leading BI solution for
midsize companies who seek to ensure
greater alignment and accountability
across their entire organization, so
business performance is maximized
within the allocated budgets. The solution
provides comprehensive BI features,
such as ad hoc query, reporting,
and analysis, out-of-the box integration
with Microsoft Office and Microsoft
SharePoint, and ease of integration
with portals and external sources of
data. The solution is specifically
designed so end users can create and
modify reports, queries, and dashboards
without the need for expensive
third-party consultants. Finally, the solution
provides low cost of ownership '
a critical criteria for budget-conscious
midsize companies.
SAP BusinessObjects solutions
increase visibility into process and
product performance, improve organizational
alignment, and enhance
resource utilization. Thus, midsize companies
are better positioned to respond
to the tough economic environment.
We invite you to take a closer look at
this solution by contacting your local
SA P sales representative or by visiting
us at www.sap.com.