Information as Your Competitive Weapon

Corporations have undergone significant changes during the past decade. Heightened competition, global markets, and deregulation have forced many companies to reengineer the way they do business. Corporations have downsized staff, redesigned business processes, and experimented with new technologies. Some of these approaches have provided a short-term boost, but few have helped companies flourish and achieve a sustained competitive advantage.

Increasingly, top executives have recognized that the key to success lies in a company's ability to leverage information. They have noticed firms that use data better than the competition are the ones that succeed. Executives are now placing a premium on giving knowledge workers access to timely, accurate, and broad-based information about customers, products, operations, and market trends. They believe that workers armed with better information will make better decisions that directly impact the bottom line.

The Business Challenge

Business processes that once took days now take seconds and generate massive amounts of information. You have to be able to take this information and act on it. You need faster decision making:

• Faster responses to opportunities and challenges.
• Faster time to market.
• Faster time to results.
• Faster return on investment.

By providing the right information to the right people at the right time, Business Intelligence (BI) enables companies to make better decisions faster than ever before. BI is all about making accurate and relevant information available to decision-makers in real-time:

• Which products or services are most profitable over time?
• Are back orders sufficient to meet projected goals?
• Who are our top ten customers and sales representatives?
• Are new products selling at the same rate in all regions?
• Are the core competencies for future growth present in the organization?

Even with some of today's best database applications and reporting tools, too many organizations remain 'data rich, information poor'. Other organizations suffer from old systems, hard-to-use data, and may face complete system replacement in order to meet their growing information management needs.  

From Concept to Reality - The Total BI Solution

We can design and take your BI initiative from concept to reality. We have coupled our expertise with leading business intelligence software solutions to deliver an end-to-end solution that rapidly and cost-effectively meets the most unique data warehousing, analysis and reporting requirements.

Transform data into knowledge, knowledge into action, and action into success:

• Extract, cleanse and transform data from multiple operational systems into separate data marts or a data warehouse.
• Store your data, often in a multi-dimensional cube format, to enable the rapid delivery of summarized information with drill-down to detail capabilities.
• Query, report and analyze your data beyond the standard capabilities of transaction-based systems - a requirement for gaining deeper business understanding and making better decisions, faster.

Business Intelligence is More than Software

In order for the BI project to be successful, it has to be linked to business needs, goals and objectives; consequently, business requirements always serve as the starting point. The business needs assessment also includes the identification and involvement of key stakeholders and users. Our experience shows that the active involvement and commitment of key stakeholders is a critical success factor.

Our proven seven step approach to BI guarantees success. 

1. Identify business needs
2. Investigate the various data systems
3. Develop prototype
4. Validate the prototype against the business needs
5. Finalize and implement the solution
6. Train the users
7. Deploy across the organization

The second step, which can be conducted at the same time as step one, is a thorough investigation of the data systems. This allows us to determine the adequacy of the current databases in capturing all the required data elements needed to satisfy the business needs. If the investigation reveals any shortfalls, we will make recommendations and help the client implement data cleansing solutions. 

A number of activities occur during the third step of the implementation process. The first activity involves the design and development of a prototype solution, including the data warehouse, the UDM, the reporting platform, etc. At this stage, the prototype solution is validated against the business requirements that were identified by the stakeholders. Changes suggested by the stakeholders are incorporated. It is at this stage that the reporting solution is finalized and implemented.

The final activity involves training the key users of the system and developing enterprise-wide deployment strategies.  We insist on the involvement of stakeholders/users throughout the entire process to create a sense of ownership and a solution that will be sustainable in the future; consequently, we insist on ongoing communication with stakeholders.