Business Intelligence Software

Twila Day left the meeting excited, but also a little nervous. Her Technology and Applications Group had just been given approval by the Director’s Council of SYSCO to proceed with a company- wide deployment of business intelligence (BI) software. The effort was intended to help SYSCO, the largest food distributor in North America, make better use of the information generated by its operations and serve its customers better. The Director’s Council, a group of senior managers with substantial power and influence, had been impressed enough by the results of a

Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. BI has been around long before computers and access to the internet. For example, an old ship building yard would have to keep track of its various transactions, employees, profit, suppliers, materials, etc. The shipyard owner would then turn this collected raw data into useful information in order to figure out where the company is going wrong and where it can improve. If the suppliers have not shipped on time for weeks the shipyard would know to find more reliable suppliers - this is a very simple example of utilizing business intelligence. In

A data warehouse and business intelligence application was created as part of the Orion Sword Group project providing business intelligence to order and supply chain management to users. I worked as part of a group of four students to implement a solution. This report reflects on the process undertaken to design and implement the solution as well as my experience and positive learning outcome.

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems[->0], query[->1]and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP[->2]), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining[->3].

Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) has been used as an umbrella term to describe the concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based decision support systems. BI also includes the underlying architectures, tools, databases, applications, and methodologies. BI’s major objectives are to enable interactive and easy access to diverse data, enable manipulation and transformation of these data, and provide business managers and analysts the ability to conduct appropriate analyses and perform the actions [Turban et al. 2008; Wixom et al. 2011]. Successful BI initiatives have been reported for major industries, from healthcare and airlines, to major IT and telecommunication firms [Anderson-Lehman et al. 2004; Carte et al. 2005; Turban et al. 2008].

In the current business world, enterprises have developed strategies and technologies which are useful for data analysis of the associated business information. This information obtained is essential in making prudent business decisions. This developed strategies and technologies used for data analysis are known as business intelligence which is abbreviated as BI. Business Intelligence is associated with businesses issues which go around its history, current situation and a future analysis of the trend of business operation. In business intelligence technologies which are key to business survival include; reporting, online analytical processing, data mining, process mining, benchmarking, predictive analysis among others. This essay discusses issues associated with business intelligence, showing an historical background, its software applications, advantages and disadvantages of business intelligence as well as describing the competition that is witnessed between Google and IBM.

In the enterprise world, business intelligence has become a common necessity in every organization whether big or small. According to Shollo and Kautz (2010, p. 1), business intelligence is defined as ‘a process, a product, and as a set of technologies, or a combination of these’. Input from a wide range of corporate stakeholders is essential to implement an effective corporate business intelligence strategy. The purpose of a corporate business intelligence strategy is to aid business with planning in a long run, to aid middle management with tactical reporting, and help operations with daily decision making to efficiently run a business (Pant 2009). A stakeholder is anybody who has an interest in a particular decision which includes people who influence a decision, or could influence it, as well as those affected by it. Contribution of corporate stakeholders in corporate business intelligence strategy will result in the strategy to be successful as well as yield more positive stakeholders.

“Technology creates visibility across the business, and enterprise-wide operational practices are essential to optimal efficiency and effectiveness. The strategic implementation of business intelligence tools and analytics, along with cross-departmental alignment, can transform data into meaningful, useful information for critical analysis. Proactive and investigative BI reporting techniques can help recognize new business opportunities and provide firms with a competitive industry advantage.” - Scott Lundstrom, group vice president and general manager of IDC Financial, Government and Health Insights (Sungard, 2014a).

Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) has been used as an umbrella term to describe the concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based decision support systems. BI also includes the underlying architectures, tools, databases, applications, and methodologies. BI’s major objectives are to enable interactive and easy access to diverse data, enable manipulation and transformation of these data, and provide business managers and analysts the ability to conduct appropriate analyses and perform the actions [Turban et al. 2008; Wixom et al. 2011]. Successful BI initiatives have been reported for major industries, from healthcare and airlines, to major IT and telecommunication firms [Anderson-Lehman et al. 2004; Carte et al. 2005; Turban et al. 2008].

Business Intelligence applications provide business information to drive decision support for achieve desired goals of the organizations and to evaluate benefits with the Business intelligence applications. Business Intelligence (BI) is a Data-driven DSS that joins data gathering, information storage, and learning administration with investigation to give data to the decision-making process. In some Computer based situations, Information of Business Intelligence utilize wellspring data and provides required sophisticated analysed information as put away in data mart or data warehouse. Most of the organizations still have lack of BI in their decision-making while implementing enterprise system. For improving the decision support

Business intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. It is a solution package, to integrate all the existing data of organizations efficiently, provide accurate report to support high level managers to make business strategic decision.

Legacy Business Intelligence tools, which more than 70% of companies today use, are becoming obsolete as they do not align with the needs of businesses today. These cumbersome and highly centralized systems cannot support increasingly dispersed teams that need access to information to take key strategic decisions that help run the business. As a result, an increasing number of corporate decision makers are turning to a next generation, easy to use real time cloud based analytical tools to achieve their business objectives.

Business Intelligence plays a major role in decision making and provide data driven decision Systems. The potential edges of business intelligence programs embrace fast and up call making; optimizing internal business processes, also with increasing operational efficiency and driving new revenues; and gaining competitive benefits over business

The main objective of this project was to meet the needs of data management, capturing data from various data sources and integrating the data into a database for reporting purposes. This was achieved previously using a legacy system called as FOCUS and is now replaced by a database using SQL Server Business Intelligence. SQL Service Business Intelligence is not only used to load data into the database but also provides tools for reporting and analysis services. Loading data is done using a tool provided by SQL Server called

Every modern company benefit from business intelligence. It has to be realized that almost every tool which is