New approach to decision making means Business Intelligence is needed

Based on a survey of 225 business leaders worldwide, carried out by IBM, it was found that enterprises are operating with bigger blind spots and they are making important decisions without access to the right information.
There is wide recognition and appreciation for new analytics coupled with advanced business management capabilities in terms of being an opportunity to close gaps and create new business advantage.

The challenge for a substantial number of businesses now appears to be information. Information is needed in hours, minutes and seconds as opposed to years, months and days, and decision making is now largely fact driven rather than based on intuition and instinct.

More than one-third of business leaders say they have significant challenges in extracting relevant information and using it to quantify risk and predict possible outcomes.

Business leaders, having identified significant information gaps, are poised for change.
Nearly three in four say more predictive information will drive better decision making to a great extent.

Only those businesses that can skillfully adopt, integrate and deploy the benefits of enterprise wide analytics and optimisation will be prepared to shape their own futures. They will be aware and precise, supporting their businesses through questioning, anticipating and empowering their employees to make more informative decisions which can be checked against facts rather than gut feelings. Business intelligence provides an organisation with the opportunity to become more efficient, achieve higher growth as a result of more insightful relationships with customers, prospects and their market as well being more proactive in terms of risk management.

Business environments are in constant flux as are information needs and organisations of all sizes should seek to gain support in managing data and interpreting and structuring it so that it becomes a source of knowledge and valuable utilisable information.

The SAP Business One application together with the Crystal Reports offering from the SAP Business Objects portfolio, delivers compelling reporting functionality and information access to small businesses. With these offerings small businesses can get up to date intelligence to drive decision making.

To find out more visit: http://www.sap.com/solutions/sap-crystal-solutions/index.epx

Intelligent Information Systems are an SAP Gold Partner, delivering SAP Business One and Crystal Solutions. To find out more visit: www.beabetterbusiness.net

ERP and BI combine forces and yield stronger benefits for SMEs

ERP’s role in providing visibility across functions and departments is where there is seemingly a strong connection with BI.

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.

ERP software is multi-module application software that integrates activities across functional departments, from product planning, parts purchasing, inventory control, product distribution, to order tracking. ERP software may include application modules for the finance, accounting and human resources aspects of a business.

So why do we need both?

ERP systems are known to produce a lot of data but not a lot of information. Data is facts and statistics where is information is data which is converted to knowledge; it’s interpreted data. BI facilitates the transformation of data to information.

Businesses are operating at an accelerated pace today forcing the need for speed in decision making but decision makers are also forced to work with an increasing amount of data.

In 2009 Aberdeen’s annual report revealed that 32% of those SME’s that have implemented their solution have extended their solution with BI or some analytical tool. Of all the SME’s surveyed, 31% had invested in some sort of BI or analytical tool, of which 51% had no ERP.

Both BI and ERP individually bring value to a business, but when married together the two produce a synergy by which the total value exceeds the sum of the parts.

As an SME the ideal solution is SAP Business One designed specifically to meet the needs of SMEs which can be integrated with Crystal reports.

The SAP Business One application together with the Crystal Reports offering from the SAP Business Objects portfolio, delivers compelling reporting functionality and information access to small businesses. With these offerings small businesses can get up to date intelligence to drive decision making.

To find out more visit: http://www.sap.com/solutions/sap-crystal-solutions/index.epx

Intelligent Information Systems are an SAP Gold Partner, delivering SAP Business One and Crystal Solutions. To find out more visit: www.beabetterbusiness.net