Many companies have invested in business intelligence (BI) systems but most of these are typical BI installations, which entail a mix of various customized and packaged intelligence systems with applications that access data from multiple stores. What this means is that the businesses have not consolidated their BI systems into one large system application, which handles different data inputs. For instance, an accounting system offer finance-oriented data output while marketing and sales system offers information on business marketing.
Using integrated BI systems reduces the number of employees obliged to perform business processes thus saving the businesses the cost of hiring additional workforce. In addition, the turnaround time of creating business reports is reduced significantly. Businesses need reports done in time so that decision-making processes are not stalled. The stagnation of the decision-making process negatively affects business growth and continuity.
In ensuring efficiencies in business processes, the BI tools and systems create benchmarks, which allow companies to easily identify areas of weaknesses and strengths and thus make swift actions to address any shortcomings. The process of mining data from the business data archives can help in uncovering forgotten, hidden or lost data, which can help a business avert past mistakes and learn from the past strategies. With the integrated business intelligence system, these business reports are available on-demand. This makes it easier to drill down and across the details of the report as well as sort and filter the details for easy tabulation.
Moreover, there is increased interactivity within the integrated BI systems as information is easily shared across departments. For instance, data stored in the accounting enterprise resource planning-ERP system and the customer relations management-CRM system is shared through data consolidation, which in turn produces better results in decision making.
As businesses continue to register increased data creation and storage, they are also finding it necessary to use that data in making decisions more quickly. In order to ensure that the huge data created by the systems is turned into meaningful information, integrated BI systems can be used to tabulate and manipulate the data. The unstructured best-of-the breed business intelligence tools are posing a challenge to business executives as the data they get from independent systems is not coordinated into one output platform where it can easily be tabulated.
However, by adopting a standardized BI strategy with help of business intelligence analytics, this helps in integration of the business intelligence for informed decision making. Whereas BI tools are not “decision makers” by themselves, if they are applied consistently and in well structured forms, they can evolve to be tools of enhancing decision making.
In addition, dashboard reports offer current metrics of the performance of the business showing the health and wellbeing of the company in real times. Key performance indicators-KPIs are offered in graphical formats through data visualization so that the users can easily tabulate the data reports. Whether, it is data from the accounting package, payroll systems or the CRM, all this can easily be accessed with the integrated BI systems tools.
Whereas the benefits of integrated BI systems may not be exhaustively covered, it is imperative to mention that companies have benefited from integrated and standardized BI systems because they are cost effective to implement.
In conclusion, as companies embrace business intelligence, it is important that they identify a BI partner who is able to offer integrated BI systems, which can help businesses save in their intelligence investment. Whereas it is difficult to place tangible value on the benefits of BI, businesses can capture the aspect of BI cost and returns on investments (ROI) for their BI investments. This can help in determining the cost of purchasing and applying the systems in data warehousing, information delivery, and data collection, and the associated infrastructure such as software and support resources, needless to mention the expertise required in enterprise business intelligence systems applications.
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