Business intelligence. More than just fancy dashboards
1st August, 2016
Nearly every business management system on the market offers a form of Business Intelligence (BI) module to provide more flexibility and enhanced data visualisation.
BI is mostly recognised as the source of the executive dashboard that contains graphical displays of major high level measurements like sales, production statistics, inventory level and the like, with alarms and drill-down capabilities.
More than simply arranging data into convenient and attractive formats, however, BI incorporates intelligent automation and integrated analytics offering comprehensive data-mining capabilities.
BI provides the tools that can turn data into knowledge and insight.
Here’s how smart businesses can tap into this incredible resource.
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How it works
Data in your ERP system is arranged for efficient storage and management, which is not necessarily the best arrangement for reporting and analysis.
BI can pull information from across the ERP environment, consolidating the data, and arranging it specifically for analysis and reporting.
Rules and processes can be incorporated to automate routine tasks to supplement manual, human operations thus improving productivity.
Beyond simple reporting
BI goes beyond simple reporting to provide critical measurements, analytical tools, and convenient access to:
- Details behind summarised indicators
- Consolidation of data from multiple sources
- The opportunity to detect emerging issues (for early resolution) and opportunities for excellence
In today’s world of Big Data, analytical and data visualisation tools are increasingly important to remaining competitive in fast-changing markets.
Combine related data into meaningful metrics
With modern in-memory BI tools like Power BI from Microsoft (the engine powering MYOB Advanced’s BI) very large amounts of data can be gathered from different sources to be organised, analysed, and explored in combinations not otherwise available.
Self-service design allows the user to organise the analysis to fit their specific role and interest, combining related data into meaningful metrics. Each analysis can also include comprehensive range of data types and measures to provide lightning fast and flexible views of Finance, Sales, Purchases, Accounts Payable, Inventory, and Accounts Receivable, for example.
Create your own analysis for a deeper understanding of key data
BI allows users to create their own dashboards, scorecards, KPIs, and analysis reports to deliver a deeper understanding of key data across the whole organisation.
The dashboard is merely a graphical display of high-level (consolidated and summarised) information that provides an overview of key performance measures, usually with indicators (red/yellow/green) to call executive’s attention to situations that are outside of normal limits.
KPIs are key performance indicators – the specific measurements that relate to important aspects of performance for your company. The user can click on the measure in question and see the next level of detail, and the next, and the next (drill-down).
Intelligent automation
Intelligent automation allows businesses to turn insight into productivity improvements.
This takes shape in the form of automating processes and unloading complex, time-consuming tasks to the system.
An Accounts Payable department, for example, can analyse debtors’ payment habits. This insight is then used to automatically batch email payment reminders based on knowledge of individual payment cycles. This data is then updated in real time on a dashboard showing the business’s cash flow forecast for the next 12 months.
In this way automation allows for a time-consuming task to be done accurately in a fraction of the time.
Did you know..?
You can use add-ons to make business intelligence functionality a reality in your business. Add-ons connect to and share data with your MYOB accounting software, extending its capability to solve a variety of different business problems.