Business intelligence (BI)

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI)

·        Business intelligence (BI), also referred to as business analytics, is a term used to describe a range of different applications and technologies used to extract and analyze large amounts of data to aid in decision making. BI includes data-mining tools and querying tools, which are often

·        interactive and visual. The growth of data-generating technologies such as RFID,combined with improvements in BI tools, has led to significant growth in the BI market. Prior to 2008, almost all of SAP’s ERP business came from traditional ERP suite applications.

·        However, in the period from 2008 to 2011, the percentage of the business that came from BI rose to 50 percent.On the left side of the diagram are the potential BI data sources, which are growingboth in number and in the volume of data produced. For example, sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media applications can provide information on consumer reaction to new products.

·        The center section represents the analytical capabilities of BI; it includes items such as analytic applications and business intelligence, which are similar sets of data analysis tools. In SAP’s framework, analytic applications are data analysis tools applied to specific industries, such as financial services, manufacturing, consumer products, retail, and utilities or to functional areas, such as supply chain management, finance, human resources, IT, and service, sales, and marketing.

·        SAP BI includes a set of tools for exploration, analysis, and presentation that can be applied to a wide range of business questions. Enterprise performance management is the concept of developing strategic goals for the organization and then gathering data to evaluate how the organization is performing in relation to those goals. The governance, risk, and compliance category represents a group of activities focused on ensuring an organization is functioning ethically and legally.

·        Governance refers to the processes that ensure that top management is receiving accurate and timely data necessary to run the organization and that control mechanisms are in place to make sure that management directions and instructions are being carried out. Risk, or risk management, consists of processes to identify risks to the organization (technological, financial, information security, supply chain disruptions, and so on) and to develop plans to minimize the potential damage to these risks. Compliance means conforming to stated requirements, which could be customer specifications for goods or services, Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements or state and federal regulations such as those relating to product safety.

·        Data warehousing is the technology used to store the large volumes of data used in the analysis. Enterprise information management is a relatively new term that describes the business and

·        Technology functions that manage information as a corporate asset. Previously, this was primarily through personal computers, but with the growth in mobile technology, an increasing variety of devices can now be used to access BI.

BI tools are typically leveraged by analysts for high level discussions which involve strategic decisions. A BI tool accesses all of the data in your data warehouse, both strategic (revenue, profit and growth), and operational (daily sales performance). BI tools enable you to conduct in-depth analyses to generate comprehensive information that can deliver high-level insights.

ERP, on the other hand, is an operational system chock full of operational and transactional data. It will give you an exact view of your business from an operational perspective, but it is not built to perform trend analyses or give you high-level overviews. It is a tool centred around delivering operational insights.