Sap Crystal Essay

As we discuss the possibility of emerging into business intelligence software we must keep in mind the overall purpose of using any type of software is to reach strategic goals in order to increase market shares. I will discuss how business intelligence software will allow us to meet those strategic goals. We will establish what type of information and analysis capabilities will be available once this business intelligence software is implemented. We will discuss hardware and system software that will be required to run specific business intelligence software. Lastly, I will give a brief synopsis on three vendors (IBM, Microsoft Microsoft and Oracle) that are dominating the business information software

Fact and data based decision making is a crucial element for success in today’s ultra-competitive business world. Many companies employ a multitude of analysts and statisticians to gather, organize and evaluate the mounds of data collected through various information systems. Late into the twentieth century companies finally halted the ancient ritual of storing data in basement file cabinets and began to rely on information technology systems to store enormous amounts of data on computer servers. Large amounts of data was being collected and stored but businesses lacked an effective way to utilize the data. During the same time period, numerous emerging technologies in computer science promised to enable the practical use of large amounts of data. SAS, originally referred to as Statistical Analysis Systems, is a company whose purpose is to create a way for users of its technology to access and utilize large amounts of data for analytical decision-making. SAS has made this possible through the creation of variety products and services that can manage a business’s data and customize its statistical analysis to improve business performance.

In the increasingly competitive global business environment, each organization needs to take advantage of every tool, opportunity, and advantage it can to achieve the best products and services, to gain and maintain market share, and keep stakeholders happy from investors and workers to supply chain and customers. The advance of data analysis has opened up new vistas to support decision making. Decision support systems (Sauter, 2010) have emerged that process various forms of data to build outcome models. These have been adopted in every segment of society, in the private and public sector, from political campaigns and the military to corporations and nonprofits alike. As a whole, the new set of tools involving the strategic use of data is called business intelligence. Within that general framework, the term analytics refers to the statistical, quantitative use of data to produce explanatory and predictive models for fact-based decision making. (Sauter, 2010).

Many massive, successful companies ' sole purpose is to create user-friendly BI tools. For example, SAP, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards are all powerful intelligence systems. These systems can help users with nearly any aspect of a company.

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.

All great organizations share one thing in common, the use of business intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) provides tools that revolutionize the way organizations manage business and decision-making. It allows them to transform mass amounts of raw data into reliable information necessary to make important business decisions. BI delivers relevant and reliable information to those who seek it with the goal of achieving better decisions faster. An employee is independently able to navigate through a company’s data and find what he or she needs without relying on others. This means an organization no longer needs to dig through compiled webs of linked spreadsheets, analyze the data manually and mash together reports. Instead, employees can use BI systems to request the specific information that is useful for them (Hitachi Solutions Canada, 2014). BI allows managers to reach the most accurate and contemporaneous information an organization’s database cannot retrieve. The software offers applications for both data analysis and presentation of results. Applications such as data mining and decision support systems allow one to contemplate how he or she wants to analyze the data. Data mining refers to the process of searching for valuable business information in a large database, data warehouse, or data mart. Decision support systems combine models and data in an attempt to analyze semi structured and some unstructured problems with

Businesses today continue to strive and grow in the industry to keep up with the never ending changes in the business they need the tools to obtain information that can be used to make decisions for the business. The decisions to make in a business can consist of knowing what geographic region to focus on, which product lines to expand, and what markets to strengthen in the industry. To obtain the type of information that has the proper content and format that can assist with strategic decisions they turned to data warehousing. It became the new paradigm intended specifically for vital strategic information.

Business Intelligence - In today 's hastily changing and competitive business environment, the need for effective business information is acknowledged. It is crucial for companies just not only to succeed, but also to survive. Business intelligence (BI) is refers to a managerial beliefs and a tool that is used in to assist organizations to manage their information in such a way so that decision making can get better. Business Intelligence (BI) has become an important part of corporate business strategies. (Azevedo, Santos) To be efficient in business intelligence companies use various software. BI software helps organizations to gain in-depth insight into their business. These analyses enable organizations to make better decisions and ultimately improve overall business performance. Businesses need information systems to be able to run these analyses.

Business Intelligence solutions provide “go anywhere” drill capability that allows executives to view summary data and then navigate to analyze exceptions or drill into detailed information. To simulate this drill through capability, ERP standard reports may provide separate sets of summary data and reports that have to be manually drawn. Going deep through reports increase the attractiveness of the BI solution as an answer to all end user questions.

The Business Intelligence dashboard is a streamlined, easily accessible, and a more accurate and significant reporting process. It presents the ability to gauge performances, understand the impact of perpetually changing conditions; it assists in making quick and well-informed decisions for performance scenario planning, as well as what-if-analysis, at all various levels of comprehensive and real-time information. In short, the dashboards provide a succinct and yet visually appealing snapshot of an organization’s performance, as a result, leadership create accountability and are better able to focus on more value added activities for proactive guidance for employees to work consistently together as a whole.

Tactical dashboards: They track departmental processes and projects and emphasize analysis more than monitoring or management. It has intermediate time horizons, uses mostly internal information, and has structured decision process. They display results in a business intelligence (BI) to monitor a projector process that they manage; it uses OLAP tools, parameterized reports, advanced visualization tools, and scenario modeling tools to encourage users to explore information to identify trends and ascertain the root causes of problems or issues and let them create plans that contain multiple scenarios. This dashboards use workflow tools to make users share their findings and request approval, also monitoring and auditing tools to track users adoption and

SAP excels at taking complex, challenging data and turning it into information with enterprises, and the website and supporting materials illustrate this point through over a dozen customer success stories. Based on the customer testimonials and the series of white papers, demos and supporting materials, it is apparent that SAP Crystal Solutions is ideally suited for enterprise-wide analytics and BI-based work in enterprises. The most interesting case studies are focused on the most complex problems that enterprises face incouding optimizing the performance of supply chains, pricing, and logistics programs within globally-based companies. SAP has a legacy of strength in delivering solutions into supply-chain based businesses and the depth of the SAP Crystal Solutions suite of applications illustrates this point (Curry, 1999). SAP's success stories for this suite of

There are a few key business issues that are addressed with SAP Crystal Reports. The first and most important is the need for useful information delivered quickly. Most companies have stored in their systems an immense amount of data, but that data can be difficult to access and understand, so what Crystal Reports does is it provides an interface whereby the user can easily call up the relevant information. The software already has the information pathways built in that the managers need, and as a result of this the reports deliver the information quickly. The second key function is to ensure that the information is easy to read and easy to use. The reports are often visual, but most importantly they reports are clean and neatly presented. This means that managers do not need to waste time sifting through poorly-organized data to find the information that they want.

Based on an assessment of the demo applications, tools and videos provided by SAP on their website for this solution, it is apparent that this is an excellent application or analytics, BI and KM tasks throughout enterprises. The ability to quickly analyze terabytes of data and gain insights and intelligence that would not otherwise have been possible makes Crystal Reports and the entire suite of applications very valuable for any business. The case studies of companies with complex value chains and operations that generate literally terabytes of data daily are finding that Crystal Solutions deliver exceptional value in finding patterns in data they would never have been able to find before (Curry, 1999). During difficult economic times the value of the many features and functions of SAP Crystal Solutions is accentuated by the exceptionally higher levels of risk that companies are dealing with (Whiting, 2007). The tools are very powerful and can easily be used for removing significant risk from any decision, while also providing a depth of insight and intelligence into any challenging decision. Combined with the knowledge management (KM) aspects of the SAP suite of analytics applications, it's

A management dashboard developed with the help of SAP shows how smoothly a critical process is running at a certain point in time. Information from the dashboard helps Burtons users identify inconsistencies a problems that should be monitored more closely.