Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (or BI) gives companies the ability to make well informed decisions and can be a key source of competitive advantages. When you can bring together data from a variety of places to quickly view your key performance indicators, you can quickly respond to improve your business performance. Leading edge business intelligence means you can test "what if?" scenarios more quickly and more flexibly than before.

Business intelligence tools deliver reporting and analysis capabilities that let you drill down to the detailed performance of your business, based on data you're already gathering. They can eliminate a lot of guesswork, enhance inter-departmental communications, coordinate activities and enable quick responses to changes in financial conditions, customer preferences and other specific operating conditions. Business intelligence tools analysing your data can reveal to you:

• Your competitive position,
• Changes in customer behaviours,
• Demographic and economic market conditions,
• How much you're selling and at what margin,
• The penetration and ROI of your campaigns.

Business intelligence tools work alongside your systems to enable the use of data you're generating as a matter of course for reporting and the measurement of your key performance indicators. By putting intelligence into your business, you and your teams can make better decisions and spot trends and aberations to more telling effect. New business intelligence tools cover the complete range of analysis functions, from static reporting to dynamic warehouse analysis.

Implementing a Business Intelligence strategy

When you implement a business intelligence strategy you could consider the following:

Goal alignment: what are the objectives of the strategy? How closely linked are these to the business plan itself? How will the business respond to the information returned by the business intelligence system?

Operational metrics: what metrics will be used for each key performance indicator? How will they be tested and can they be benchmarked against performance in other parts of the business?

Ownership: who will own and monitor the business intelligence system to ensure that its objectives are being met and appropriate responses are being made?

Business Intelligence technology

Successful business intelligence is dependent upon the availability of data generated by the very tasks you want to measure and analyse. QGate are data management specialists and can help you ensure that you're capturing the data that enables the most effective measurement of your company's performance. The tools we use teach you things you didn't know about your business.

You then need to make sure that your business intelligence tools access this data in the most efficient and manageable way. Traditional systems require detailed configuration and testing and achieving the view of your business that you want may require lengthy trial and error processes. With QlikView, business intelligence and analysis is simpler and delivers fast returns on investment.

QlikView annotates data directly from memory so it returns far more dynamic information and can be configured and changed by any user such that they get the view of the business that they want. Using a simple three colour interface - or whatever graphical representation you want - you can quickly scrutinise and assess your company's or team's performance.