THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE & SAP HANA

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions.

 

 

Why is Business Intelligence (BI) important to your company?

 

Business Intelligence, BI is a concept that usually involves the delivery and integration of relevant and useful business information in an organization. Companies use BI to detect significant events and identify/monitor business trends in order to adapt quickly to their changing environment and a scenario. If you use effective business intelligence training in your organization, you can improve the decision making processes at all levels of management and improve your tactical  strategic management processes.  Here are some of the top reasons for investing in a proper business intelligence system.

1. To Get Insights into Consumer Behavior

One of the main advantages of investing in business intelligence software and skilled personnel is the fact that it will boost your ability to analyze the current consumer buying trends. Once you understand what your consumers are buying, you can use this information to develop products that match the current consumption trends and consequently improve your profitability since you will be able to attract valuable customers.

2. To Improve Visibility

Do you know who the best performers are?

Can you easily identify areas for improvement?

Is stock going missing and you can’t identify where it’s going?

Is there an error in your accounts and you need to drill down to invoicing or billing quickly to make your P&L balance – can you do this in a few clicks or do you need to re-run a report that takes forever?

If you want to improve your control over various important processes in your organization, you should consider investing in a good BI system. This will improve the visibility of these processes and make it possible to identify any areas that need improvement. Moreover, if you currently have to skim through hundreds of pages in your detailed periodic reports to assess the performance of your organisation’s processes, you can save time and improve productivity by having skilled intelligence analysts using relevant BI software. Good BI should be at the heart of every organisation as it can provide increased control. Visibility is essential.

3. To Turn Data into Actionable Information

A BI system is an analytical tool that can give you the insight you need to make successful strategic plans for your organization. This is because such a system would be able to identify key trends and patterns in your organisation’s data and consequently make it easier for you to make important connections between different areas of your business that may otherwise seem unrelated. As such, a BI system can help you understand the implications of various organisational processes better and enhance your ability to identify suitable opportunities for your organization, thus enabling you to plan for a successful future.

4. To Improve Efficiency

One of the most important reasons why you need to invest in an effective BI system is because such a system can improve efficiency within your organisation and, as a result, increase productivity. You can use business intelligence to share information across different departments in your organization. This will enable you to save time on reporting processes and analytics. This ease in information sharing is likely to reduce duplication of roles/duties within the organization and improve the accuracy and usefulness of the data generated by different departments. Furthermore, information sharing also saves time and improves productivity.

5. To Gain Sales & Market Intelligence

Whether you are a sales person or a marketer, you probably like to keep track of your customers – probably using a CRM to help you. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It refers to software that handles all aspects of an organization’s interactions with its customers. In other words, it collects the data about your customer and tries to make sense of it, presents it to you in various tables and charts. That may include the entire sales cycle, from winning new customers, to servicing and tracking existing customers, to providing post-sales services. CRM systems are now more involved in decision-support processes than ever before.

 

6. To Gain Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers making strategic decisions for an organization. Excellent BI systems should essentially help  understanding and learning what is happening in the world outside the business so one can be as competitive as possible. It means learning as much as possible, as soon as possible, about one's industry in general, one's competitors, or even one's county's particular zoning rules.  

 7. Increase Return on Investment (ROI).

Through better strategic awareness, faster reporting, decreased operating costs/lower overheads and access to better quality data and information, BI can positively influence a company’s ROI.

8. To turn data into actionable information. 

A BI system is an analytical tool that can give you the insight you need to make successful strategic plans for your organization. Any qualified member of the organization can gain access to important company data such as business metrics, dashboards and other critical reports through mobile devices. As long as there is Internet access, important business data can be accessed and utilized by key people from the organization.  BI software can give you a bigger insight into the manufacturing costs of your company and the ability to make changes to production in order to come up with larger profitability.

9. Conduct better inventory

 

Business Intelligence software helps you make the right orders for inventory (the right amount at the right time). This way, your customers can receive their goods just when they need to receive them and your company doesn’t have the added burden of having to stock excess inventory.

10. Gain a better understanding of your business’ past, present and future

 

One of the biggest strengths of a BI system is letting you know your business stats over a given period of time such as how much pieces of a certain product were sold, in which location and by which customer representative. This data can be utilized so that an advantage over the competition can be developed. A complete view on customer behavior and experience is provided by certain metrics and analyses, which in turn helps you plan better for your company’s future.

In order to reap all the benefits of an effective business intelligence system and strategy for your company, we recommend you invest in skilled BI personnel as well as training, and a software designed for analytical efficiency and accessibility. You should also make sure that the system and strategy you choose can analyze both the content and context of data.

SAP HANA AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 

 

SAP HANA (Systems, Applications & Products)  is an in-memory platform for processing high volumes of data in real-time. HANA allows data analysts to query large volumes of data in real-time. HANA's in-memory database infrastructure frees analysts from having to load or write-back data.

SAP Business Intelligence delivers insight into every aspect of your organization by distributing information on premise, on device, and via the cloud. With native integration to SAP HANA, users have the ability to model business scenarios in real-time, adding tremendous value to your business.

As with all investments that involve time and money, a benefits case comes into play which almost always becomes focused on monetary values. BI investments are of course no different. However, it’s not always easy to put hard numbers behind BI projects, as there are lots of intangible benefits. It can be difficult to know upfront all of the things that may help your business by investing in BI, sometimes making it difficult to justify the outlay. 

When justifying your BI investment, what must take precedence is the focus on the business outcomes that will occur as a result of the initiative - both financial and non-financial. While this is not an exhuastive list, here are 7 key areas that you should look at more deeply to help you evidence the benefits: 

• The ability to automate (i.e. efficiencies which are therefore a little easier to monetise) and this means improving people productivity
• Exposure to key business insights to enable smarter decisions
• Identifying new opportunities that had not been spotted previously
• Improved data quality (particularly in visualisation/dashboard projects)
• Increased internal collaboration, interaction and engagement
• More business innovation and new ways of working
• A stepping stone for future organisational changes and development

CONCLUSION  

There’s always an opportunity cost with SAP BI investments, which means you won’t always know exactly what’s possible until you actually start your journey. There’s also a cost of doing nothing, which is rarely explored to the same level of scrutiny as any proposed expenditure, but often doing nothing can be far more detrimental. Just think of the impact of frustrated users stifled by outdated tools, limited business innovation, untapped revenue opportunities, information siloes with offline development and ungoverned local BI solutions.

One thing is certain, those companies that do invest in SAP BI, through whatever means of justification, do see the value. Market research from those companies who are investing in analytics are substantially more likely to outperform peers with some studies showing 33% higher revenue growth.