Business Intelligence Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Web and Mobile App Development

Top 5 Reasons: Why You need Business Intelligence

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Jay

In general, each organization needs Business Intelligence (BI) at some point. For example, when a retail company is started – there was no scope for ERP with minimal business transactions having few employees on the roll.

As the business picked up, I wanted to find answers to some obvious questions like “What is the sales trend over a given period?”, “Which commodity is having more demand during festive seasons?”, “What is rate of growth year-wise?” etc.

Having said that, even the tiniest organizations need some kind of analyzed data, graphical display adds value.

BI – A need for Any Sized Company:

Be it mid-sized or smaller companies (SMBs), they do have same need as the big companies do for using BI.

It is required for better visibility of the business performance followed by corrective decisions. In summary, the intelligence reports are equally important for irrespective of the company size.

Challenges:

The truth is, most SMBs usually use the Excel spreadsheet as a tool for analysis. Every day they enter the data and prepare the report manually.

Several reports created by various employees very often without any real coordination resulting in-appropriate intelligent output.

So, when management asks a simple question like, “What is the percent of growth rate compared to that in last financial year?” and the answers don’t match. In addition to that, it will take longer to deliver the reports.

With time the company increases, with increase in employees, and thereby hike in transactions, it becomes too much to be handled for analysis.

The need for BI is necessitated.

Solutions:

To meet the challenges to get an accurate intelligence output, the KPI (Key-Performance-Indicators) & key metrics need to be well defined for the business.

These are to be supported by data warehouse and BI reporting tools.

For example, as a retail vendor, we need to analyze our business pipeline over the period of the entire year.

We could get the fact that the most favorable period is December-January and the most slowdown period is March-April.

Based on this intelligence report we plan our purchasing strategy and can minimize the losses.

So, for this purpose we did not opt for any expensive software rather we built our own BI Tool with open source components and interfaces of latest trend.

So, we can agree that, in order for prosperity & growth of your organizations, you must consider to have BI in place so that the performance can be measured and appropriate decisions can be taken based on the gaps found.

Conclusion:

5 reasons to invest in Business Intelligence today

Measure Business Performance
Analyzing Gaps
Appropriate decision making
Minimize loss of revenue
Achieve consistent growth

If you are really interested to boost your business, Andolasoft is committed to provide the high-performance business intelligence through reporting, monitoring and consultation.

It would be a great pleasure for me, if you contributed your informative idea on this post.

Thank you for your involvement.

How Business Intelligence Can Help Direct Sale Organization

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Jay

As of now, Big-data has already created a lot of buzz across all industries. An organization has to handle various types of data like financial, personnel, accounting, sales and lots more.

These lists are endless. To discover information that could help in the better decision making process or to identify new business opportunities from those endless sets of data, is one of the biggest challenges for an organization.

This challenge becomes more enormous for direct sales organisations.

In today’s Business intelligence dashboards, the end users of every sector follow an effective method of gaining greater insights into their business without the need to go back to the IT or business analysts to get more data.

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And those types of data information, business intelligence and knowledge in the hands of the sales and marketing team means growth for those departments.

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is the combination of various technologies, tools, applications and best practices that helps a business to integrate, collect, analyse and present raw data to an actionable and insightful business data.

Business intelligence is prepared with:

Data Mining
Querying and reporting
Analytical processing

The major challenges for the direct dales companies :

The business hierarchies need to be on top across all the brands.
Taking longer to answer to critical business questions.
Lot of person-hours wasted for preparing daily transaction report.
Difficult to maintain the inventory for which the customers do not getting the right product in right time.
Lack in customer satisfaction without good services.
Preparation of the business report for board meeting.
A single application could reduce technical support but impact planning flexibility thereby possibly reducing the performance and reliability.
Individual multiple applications could provide the flexibility required by the individual brands but would increase development time, cost and continuous technical support.
As per the need, a combined corporate view of actual, budgets and forecast scenarios must be taken care of.
Reporting requirements to be based on each brand, zone, categories and time.
Collect source files from the third party vendor.
Send the report through mail & put into the drop-box.
To build the excel report using ‘n’ number of sheets with separate dynamic report headers.
Organizations who are struggling with such immense data, Business Intelligence(BI) is the right option for them. BI can help to identify new opportunities from those massive unstructured information; whose may be remain unnoticed.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou– Salesmate.

At Andolasoft we provide following supports to our clients.

The data-warehouse solution has been implemented in MYSQL 5.1, and incorporates data from one principal source such as, Daily’s sales/order information.
MYSQL 5.1 provides extreme performance for large data warehouses, improves data warehouse performance, availability, and manageability by partitioning large tables.
Pentaho(Kettle) used as an Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) tool for loading data into the data warehouse from different data sources: Data consolidated from various data sources such as Flat files(csv, xls, txt) & OLTP databases.
The data in the warehouse is being processed for reporting and analysis purposes. The data is accessed through Excel. Data can be captured by stylist, item, store, zone, accounting year, quarter and period, and brand and concept.

Reports:

Pentaho, Excel & CSV Add-ons were used for the purpose of reporting and analysis.
Reports could be generated for a specific stylist aggregation, i.e. zone, company, concept, brand, for a sequence day, week, quarter, or year.
Reports could be generated for a specific time to know the information about the booked item.
Reports could be generated to know the revenue income of the organization & compare with current MTD to Last MTD, like that current QTD & Last QTD.

Technologies That We Used:

MYSQL 5.1
Pentaho (Kettle)
Pentaho (Mondrian) as an OLAP
Excel & CSV Add-ons

Overall Benefits:

Data Warehouse designed for analysis, pattern search and reporting has been created.

Help to develop and deliver better forecasting: Answer ‘what if’ questions with a click of a button. Forecasting and planning can be conducted by taking existing data sets, applying theoretical projections and estimations to that information, to model and predict future outcomes.
Eliminate guesswork: Business intelligence can provide more accurate historical data, real-time updates, synthesis between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive ‘what if?’ analysis,” eliminating the need to guesstimate.
Get faster answers to any business queries
Get key business metrics reports when and where we need them
Identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities: BI allows firms to leverage customer data to build, refine and modify predictive models that help sales representatives to up-sell and cross-sell products at appropriate customer touch points.
Manage better inventory
See where your business has been, where it is now and where it is going: BI has been very successful at explaining what happened to the business over some defined period of time — for example, how many products were sold, through which party, in which geography, or by which customer segment
Integrated budgeting & planning processes in a centralized web-based application.

Implementation Of BI For A DS Organization

We at Andolasoft have expertise on building revenue, budgeting and forecasting data warehouse(DWH) to take care of the needs of each brand, timezone and category which minimizes both IT support and the technical expertise required by the management.

In the present market, the DWH reporting tools are expensive and beyond the affordability for the medium scale organizations. To cut down the cost, we provide well-formatted .xls & .csv file reports for the top management.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

LEARN MORE

Conclusion:

One of the goals of business intelligence is to help the corporate executives, managers and other operational heads to take necessary data driven decisions for business.

Most of the companies use BI for cost-cutting, creating better business opportunities and identifying inefficient processes of business.

If you are in search of a better Business Intelligence software development service, you can contact us. Our Andolasoft expertise will help to develop a budgeting, revenue and forecasting data warehouse that helps in your business growth.

Do you wish to add anything to this topic? Share it in the comments section below.

Data-Warehousing for Small & Medium Organizations

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Jay

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – by the Chinese philosopher Laozi

Most of the people have heard about the data warehousing but they donot have fair idea about what exactly is achieved by doing this. As a business owner, whether you need it. You can be in a better position to take a decision once you know the power of Business Intelligence & Dataware-housing.

Let’s say you are a small/mid-sized organization, and you want to have some reports to have in-depth view about how your business is doing. There may be any or some of the reasons below:

1. Does the concern person in your organization struggle every month to produce the revenue/sales reports as desired?

2. Do you have your top management team spend their valuable time for analyzing business progresses to come up with meaningful reports involving figures & charts?

3. Does it take repeated manual effort using spreadsheet for building the report for analysis for getting a picture of your organization’s performance?

If your answer is “yes” to any or some of the above questions or your data querying looks like the above image then, it is the time to consider about the better process for obtaining business reports.

And believe it or not, to build a data warehousing it is not very expensive as you might have heard about.

A perfect case-study for a Data-Warehouse

What is a DWH or data-warehouse? Generally, a Data Warehouse is a randomly accessible reliable source of data for generating information in a business system and serve the analytical needs of the organization.

Objective of a Data Warehouse:

To serve as the company’s principal source of information for business planning and decision making.
To have a central and secure source of all business information.
It is essential for those who have a “need to know” how to make information readily available.
To store Business Information in a secure, reliable, and randomly retrievable form.

Small and Medium organizations should consider whether you’ve defined your reporting needs carefully enough to really take advantage of a data warehouse.

1. Are you sure you’re able to do everything using your existing systems?

2. Have you thought about the dashboards, daily, weekly and monthly reports that could help executives and staffs?

3. Do You have any idea how your organization is performing?

If not, it makes sense to start righaway!.

For small and medium organization which having more than 50 staff, a well thought for implementing the data warehouse and reporting strategy. It is an interesting option as well as robust and often powerful way to support the organizational reporting and analysis.

Successful Outcomes for Small and Medium Organizations

Andolasoft is a 5+ yrs old Software Development company. Here we focus on Business Intelligence(BI) development. In fact, the maiden customer of our company awarded us Pentaho project, since then we never looked back and till today have customers in 8 countries.

Andolasoft works in an association to your company and help you achieve your business goals faster and in a cost effective way.

Well-designed data-warehouse needs to deliver the new functionality at regular interval, so that the organization realize the benefits.

In one example, Andolasoft implemented many data-warehouse solutions using Mysql for retail services, medical organization, who used the solution to understand and subsequently increase the profitability of their projects.

Call us on +1 (408) 625-7188 or email us to get in touch and learn how Andolasoft can help your organization suffering from reliable reporting issues.