Business analysis system promotes agility

To monitor their business performance, market-leading organizations deploy business analytics (BA) systems that help them rapidly implement, modify, and extend applications related to strategic planning, sales, marketing, operational analysis, and reporting. Business agility means a shorter decision-making process, as getting to market quickly is important. Financial planners, auditors, CFOs, and other managers want to free themselves from chores and spend time solving business problems instead of waiting for answers. A complete business analytics solution can capture massive amounts of data and rapidly increase business agility by:

After having all the data and the ability to analyze and report on the business in an all-round way based on the data, the enterprise can quickly introduce new products (new products, new services, new channels), quickly reorganize the business, and gain a larger market share or leadership. Business analytics solutions can even help reinvigorate existing projects or product lines, says Michael Hugos, a Kellogg MBA and CIO. "Agile systems can help companies invest in new market opportunities before profit margins drop," he said.

Futurist Jim Carroll believes that many businesses can be transformed. “Typically, new revenue comes from new products and the ability to enter new markets. But that’s not the only way to increase revenue, think about business model innovation. For example, expanding existing markets, through New ways to acquire customers that were previously unavailable (or customers that were not previously targeted)."

Understanding Business Performance Management Systems

Novelist Marcel Proust once wrote, "Real A journey of discovery is not about exploring new territory, but about cultivating new perspectives.” The same applies to companies that have not achieved market leadership. They face agility issues, but little is known about the full operational state of the business. At the most basic level, while they understand their budgets, they are not yet able to tie the budgets to measures of business drivers. They are slow to respond to the market and are reactive rather than proactive, and they continue to miss out on great opportunities to gain customers and revenue.

Let's look at some of today's business performance management systems, the precursors to business analytics solutions. Most of these solutions are first-generation solutions that are either single-function single applications that provide only consolidation or reporting capabilities, or multiple applications cobbled together.

A single application solution sacrifices versatility because it only needs to satisfy a single need. In most cases, such programs only provide reporting functions, but lack financial applications such as planning, consolidation, and financial statements. As consumers, we all have a similar experience when looking for something online and intending to order it. We happily browsed the product description and eagerly entered the credit card number, only to be told to search for the relevant distributor.

It's equally frustrating when it comes to performance management systems that are loosely cobbled together from multiple applications: companies that use these types of solutions integrate a lot of good systems with very little functionality. ideal. The data used by operations personnel, financial personnel, and executives for analysis is stored in independent "warehouses", and each "warehouse" has independent tools and interfaces for data analysis or browsing.

Analysis and reports from business teams are either fragmented or barely linked, with multiple versions of the same business situation. Few have access to all the data, and most have only a partial understanding of business performance. Users may be able to learn about the company's plans, but not be able to compare that information with the business drivers of each department—that is, end demand. Or the process for obtaining this information is so redundant that it prevents the information from being used across the enterprise.

Businesses that use performance management software may have little understanding of the challenges and inconveniences they face every day. Spreadsheets may be their only working interface. They may well have adapted to late responses; many users have limited access to performance-level data; and they may have lost their collaborative approach due to so many questions. To complicate the work, the coexistence of multiple solutions places higher demands on IT departments, requiring them to have expertise in data management, extraction, transformation, and other fields.

Software manageability is also very complex and costly, as businesses have to deal with these issues: the individual components of the software were not designed or created to be integrated into a single BPM package; different software vendors, their Software upgrade schedules and standards vary; additional application functionality is expensive; extensive data migration increases the likelihood of errors; and auditing capabilities are lacking. For most businesses, solving these problems requires access to expensive consulting services. All of these inconveniences can cause businesses to lose their edge.

Understanding Business Analytics Systems

Currently, companies are shifting to a BI/BPM approach. This shift is driven by the new technology economy. Small and midsize businesses that realize the importance of responsiveness, despite lacking resources and IT support, are creating greater demand—on the same scale, if not greater, than larger enterprises. These companies are beginning to doubt the cost and value of traditional, discrete systems. In addition, in these companies, CFOs and CIOs are close partners in proposing enterprise-level solutions, and they can see the inherent benefits of complete, high-value performance management software.

Today, mature, stand-alone business analytics systems (including BI and BPM) can bring the following benefits to enterprises:

A mainstream solution, coupled with participatory planning and analysis capabilities, enables companies to fully collaborate on strategic issues , so that the enterprise can see the real situation rather than a one-sided plan, and help it to manage and utilize resources in a unified manner. It also opens the door to the flexibility of market leaders. In fact, agile organizations that choose a business analytics approach are often surprised that they can address such a broad range of challenges and act quickly after identifying key drivers of business growth.

While the BA solution keeps end users busy, it reduces the human input of the IT department. A unified platform brings standardization of all infrastructure, easy upgrade operations, and minimal human input for configuration management. Self-service applications take the hassle out of application development. This allows IT departments to focus on improving the infrastructure that increases enterprise agility.

Business analysis tools with these characteristics can improve the performance of the enterprise—collecting key information on all aspects of the enterprise and rearranging this information into an easy-to-use form; providing assistance in information analysis for informed decision-making; Last but not least is to help companies execute their decisions.

Enterprises with a passion for innovation and business growth are often attracted to one solution for all applications, or one foundational platform. All its components are integrated and all data and metadata are shared across applications. Business teams can work with just one set of data. Each user can query and report using data from the same system without introducing new applications or having to focus on multiple user conventions and features.

As more and more companies expand BPM to other departments, so do users who lack experience with performance management software. These users expect software to help them independently output reports, analyze data, and perform "what-if" analyses.

The second-generation business analysis software provides users with advanced functions, which are convenient for users to quickly complete analysis and reporting, and promote further data mining and visualization. These features include:

Business Analytics for Fast Response

Businesses conduct millions of transactions every day or hour. With the data obtained from these transactions, all teams in the business need to perform various analyses to evaluate sales by storefront, by brand, and even by sales rep.

Key performance attributes in dynamic business analysis scenarios include:

Solutions supporting in-memory databases have the above features, eliminating disk space bottlenecks—that is, tedious database upgrades and recalculations are required in a timely manner, thereby increasing the speed of decision-making . According to Dan Vessett, R&D director for analytics and data warehousing software at IDC, businesses have reached a level of relative complexity where end users are eager to get the information they need. "IT devices need to provide real-time access to information to support self-service environments," he said. "End users will be outraged when they can't immediately see the results of their interactions with performance management applications." As more knowledgeable employees and departments provide analytical tools, and their data warehouses expand exponentially, business analytics solutions must meet the growing demands. Significant new features must be added in weeks or days. With a powerful, intuitive business analytics solution, customers can start using their initial applications in as little as three weeks.

The solution must support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, it must be scalable to multi-core processors, and it must be able to support geographically dispersed users as the company expands in the global competition.

Agility is not impossible. Once agility is achieved, the benefits are endless. In the business analysis solution, the flexible combination of BI and BPM systems provides users with rapid response capabilities, flexibility, ease of use, and scalability, thereby helping users to grasp and explore the business situation of the enterprise in an all-round way. With this transformative technology, creative corporate employees will have a greater ability to innovate and adapt.

Original reprinted with permission from Ben Plummer's Business Analytics: The Perfect Fit for the Agile Enterprise in the October 2007 issue of DM Direct. Translated by Liu Wei.

DM Review, Copyright 2007 by DMReview.com and SourceMedia Inc.

Ben Plummer is Vice President of Global Marketing for Applix Corporation.