The four core business intelligence(BI) components: Data Feeds , Extract-Transform-Load Process , Data Warehouse and Presentation Layer come together and form a complete BI solution. Each tier plays an important role in keeping the system current and running. As you can probably guess, implementing and maintaining a system like this is not easy and...
The BI Presentation Layer (Presentation of Knowledge)
The presentation layer is a logical tier in the architecture where business intelligence client software is used by the business users. The responsibility of these visual tools is to surface the data cleanly from a data warehouse or data mart to the user. This tier is sometimes referred to as the presentation of knowledge, as it is responsible for presenting not just data but insight in an easy-to-consume format.
In a typical BI implementation, usually there isn’t just one type of presentation software used. BI client software includes specific tools for different audiences. For example, a company executive may...
The Data Warehouse
The data warehouse is a storage repository for data that is used in business intelligence(BI) software. The end result of the ETL process is a data repository that is highly optimized for analysis and querying. Data warehouses tend to hold a great deal of historical information and tend to have large storage requirements. Therefore, they are usually stored in enterprise database software (such as Microsoft SQL Server) that allows for optimal use of the server hardware.
The data warehouse can be the primary repository that communicates with BI tools in the
presentation layer or it can be used as a staging area for...
Extract-Transform-Load Process
Now that we have isolated the data we want to expose in our BI system, we need a process to move it into our BI platform. This process can be implemented using a multitude of different methodologies. I will focus on a couple of them. The three data feeds make up our global source in this example. We need a process to transform the data and a destination...
Data Feeds
A business intelligence(BI) system is nothing without a valid data source. When designing a BI system, we first need to determine what data we want to consume for analysis. Most organizations have various information systems that aid them in their day-to-day operations. Internal data from a system that aids in everyday operations of an organization...
Case Study: 5 Categories of BI Identified for McCormick
To represent Business Intelligence (BI) projects of McCormick, use the five categories of BI that identified for McCormick. In actual practice, there might well be more than five projects, but let’s use five that will suffice. There are several ways to go about creating the BI opportunity map, one of which is to have one person array the projects within...
The Need to Make Better Decisions
If only one term had to be used to describe the competitive business environment, it would be cutthroat. No matter what kind of industry or its size, every company is constantly trying hard to get a competitive advantage over its competitor. This is always happened in any small or big scale companies to one-up each other. One way an organization can attain an edge over its competition is by making decisions that have an increased positive impact and reduced risk to attain their goals.
Making the proper decision on any difficult task to selecting the best among alternatives can be hard. This is amplified in business...
Decision Support Systems
The need for company executives to make better decisions and the rapid evolution of computing power led to the birth of decision support systems (DSSs). A DSS is a type of computer information system whose purpose is to support decision making processes. A well-designed DSS is an interactive software system that helps decision makers aggregate useful information from raw data, documents, and business models to solve problems and make decisions.
While these systems were first implemented in executive circles, they have quickly grown to be used by trained professionals as well. Various remnants of DSS software implementations...
Case Study: McCormick Driven Business Intelligence Value Creation Opportunities
Based on McCormick’s industry environment, business drivers, strategies, goals, and business design, the following Business Intelligence (BI) opportunities can be idenitified. Each would help McCormick improve profit and performance.
Product development BI. Examples include sales trends by consumer end product categories such as beverages...
What Does Business Analytics Mean?
It’s quite easy to imagine a bank that runs all its customer processes and dialogue programs entirely without using IT—and what really hard work that would be. The point here is, of course, that you can have business analytics(BA) without deploying software and IT solutions. At a basic level, that has been done for centuries, but today, it just wouldn’t stack up. In this book, we look at BA as information systems, consisting of three
elements:
The information systems contain a technological element, which will typically be IT-based, but which in principle could be anything from papyrus scrolls and yellow sticky notes...
Case Study: McCormick Opportunity Analysis
Worth $2 billion McCormick commonly known as manufacturer of food and beverage ingredients. Based solely on publicly available information, this section shows you step by step how McCormick might analyze its Business Intelligence (BI) opportunities and applied that analysis to improve its profits and operating effectiveness. McCormick sells materials...
Using Business Intelligence to Capture Business Value
In economic terms, the business value of an investment (an asset) is the net present value of the after-tax cash flows associated with the investment. For example, the business value of an investment in a manufacturing plant is the sum of the incremental after-tax cash flows associated with the sale of the products produced at the plant. Similarly, an investment in BI creates an asset that must be used to generate incremental after-tax cash flow. Accordingly, BI investments should be subjected to a rigorous assessment of how the investment will result in increased revenues, reduced costs, or both.
Although there...
The Origins of Business Intelligence
Now that we have a better understanding of what BI is, let’s take a brief look at its origins. This examination will help show where BI fits with other parts of the IT portfolio, such as enterprise transactional applications like enterprise requirements planning (ERP), and will help differentiate BI uses from other IT uses. It’s also important to understand that enabling BI technologies are mature, low-risk technologies that have been used successfully by major companies for more than a decade.
Although recently the term BI has become one of the new IT buzzwords, the organizational quest for BI is not new. Approaches...
What Is Business Intelligence?
If that’s what BI is not, then what is it? BI combines products, technology, and methods to organize key information that management needs to improve profit and performance.
A single product. Although many excellent products can help you implement BI, BI is not a product that can be bought and installed to solve all your problems “out of the box.”
A...
Toyota: From Excel to Business Intelligence
This article illustrates a typical case in which information flow could not meet the needs of managers. Information was late sometimes inaccurate and not shared by all. The old system did not meet the needs to make fast decisions, evaluate large amounts of information that was stored in different locations and collaboration. The solution is a technology called business intelligence (BI) which is based on data warehouse and provides a strategic advantage.
Problem
Toyota Motor sales USA (TMS) sells its vehicles to Toyota dealers across the USA used to take 9 to 10 days in transit and an average vehicle costs about...