Nick Whitehead, Senior Director, Business Intelligence Solutions EMEA at Oracle, highlights why pre-built BI applications make more sense.

Employees in companies in every industry in South Africa rely on information to make decisions that impact on the bottom line. Ironically, often the information they need is difficult to obtain because it it either does not reside in their departmental systems or is fragmented across the organisation.

However, although various company functions such as sales, marketing, operations, finance and human resources (HR) are interconnected, the information they produce and store is not. Hence, for a business to achieve optimal performance, insight across functional boundaries must be achieved.

For example, sales, marketing, and service professionals need information from finance, HR, and manufacturing to help them better manage customers. HR professionals need financial information to gain a better understanding of compensation trends and other workforce costs. In turn, manufacturing and procurement professions need data on customer orders, material, and labour costs to more effectively manage the supply chain.

Most companies lack this kind of cross-value chain insight because the required data is stored in disconnected systems, such as supply chain, HR, order management, billing, financial and CRM systems.

Moreover, the traditional reports and dashboards they use are typically confined to one subject or functional area, difficult to use and maintain, and cannot provide insight across the company value chain. The resulting siloed view of the business makes it extremely difficult to optimise decision making.

There are however applications that can provide the answer to this critical business challenge. There are complete pre-built BI Applications that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence for everyone in an organisation – from the front line employees to senior management that enable better decisions, actions and business processes.

Designed for both single source and heterogeneous environments, these solutions enable organisations to gain insight from a range of data sources and applications, including Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, and third party systems including industry specific applications.

Oracle BI Applications were developed with the expectation that data used for analysis resides in multiple places and potentially multiple packaged applications. They have pre-built extract, transform and load adapters and business logic to tap into a multitude of common operational applications and data sources.

Oracle BI Applications include a data warehouse design with a common Enterprise Information Model, enabling true cross-value chain intelligence and near real-time access and intelligence across virtually any data source. The result is that is that these applications provide a true cross-enterprise view, regardless of where the data may be physically stored.

This enables organisations to realise the value of packaged BI application, such as rapid deployment, lower TCO, and built-in best practices. But because they are built using Oracle`s market-leading BI Foundation (BI Suite Enterprise Edition) customers can easily extend the BI applications to meet their specific needs, or build complementary custom BI applications – all on one common BI architecture.

The value of pre-built BI applications approach

Studies have shown that building a BI and data warehouse from scratch can take a year or more to complete, cost millions of Rands, and yet still often fail to meet business needs and expectations. The reasons for these failures include technology limitations, skills gaps, poorly defined business requirements, and organisational politics, to name a few.

Conclusion

Across industries, companies are facing increased pressure to grow revenues while holding costs in check. This means ensuring that money spent on efforts to market, acquire, sell to, and service customers is returning the best possible results. It also means that companies need to manage their business operations as cost-effectively as possible so they meet their revenue and profitability targets.



Tags: Oracle