Seraphim Mansyreff of Atos Origin has almost 11 years of commercial SAP transactional (OLTP) and Analytical (OLAP) system exposure.

The value of making an informed decision is the paradigm of Business Intelligence (BI). In my experience, SAP implementations tend to focus on making business processes efficient, but seem to lose sight on measuring corporate performance effectiveness. In the current economic downturn, the business value of BI is being able to assess the impacts of managerial and operational processes to increase revenue and/or reduce costs.

The widespread use of technology can generate tremendous amounts of data within an organization. This data contains information that is invaluable to the organization’s decision-makers. BI is the key to leveraging this wealth of data and enables your organization to track, understand and manage business in order to maximize corporate performance. More specifically, organizations are able to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings.

An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is able to unlock information held within disparate databases. Wherever the data resides, whether it is stored in operational systems, data warehouses, data marts and/or packaged applications, users can prepare reports and drill deep down into the information to understand what drives their business, without technical knowledge of the underlying data structures or reliance on IT developers. The most successful BI applications allow users to do this with an easy-to-understand and non-technical graphical user interface. The BI application provides a mechanism for non-technical users to pinpoint what drives their business activity and determines the aspects of the business that gives the greatest edge over their competition.

Additionally, the business data warehouse is a central repository for Sarbanes-Oxley Act-relevant data, and it provides a means to meet the Act’s requirements for data integrity and transparency. The EDW is the ideal vehicle to ensure internal controls and processes remain within governmental and/or environmental guidelines. The value is achieved by safeguarding all relevant business transactions are properly recorded, authorized, and reported, and are not prone to error or manipulation. Visualization provides timely, easy-to-use views into the data for organizations to monitor regulatory and statutory compliance.

The Process for Quantifying BI Benefits

Top-level management expects IT to justify investments by presenting quantifiable cost/benefit ratios, typically using ROI, as a key measure. Typical benefits from a BI deployment can be summarized into four main categories:

Direct quantifiable benefits: Examples include working time saved in producing reports and enhancing the information asset, by selling organizational information to suppliers.

Indirect quantifiable benefits: Examples include improved customer service by encouraging new and different business based on analyzing buying behavior.

Unpredictable benefits: Examples include result of discoveries made by the user community.

Intangible benefits: Examples include improved communication, job satisfaction and sharing of intellectual capital.

The following method has provided insight for evaluating the benefits of a system solution. This approach has the advantage of taking both quantifiable and intangible benefits into account:

1. Quantify the expected measurable benefits.
2. Qualitatively describe, as precisely as possible, the anticipated intangible benefits. Is the expectation to improve customer service, to increase business to the same customer and/or do we want to differentiate our service portfolio, to attract new customers?
3. Estimate the total cost of ownership (TCO) including hardware, software, personnel, consulting services, and future ongoing costs. Bear in mind that the choice of system architecture—integrated or non-integrated—can greatly affect total cost of ownership.

In my opinion, just having information offers little benefit, but the effective analysis of information is paramount in providing organizations with the means to meet regulatory governance and compliance and gaining the necessary competitive advantage. BI will enable the enterprise – giving employees greater accessibility to information to empower them to make informed decisions yielding greater results. The survival of organizations is determined by their flexibility and agility to adapt to new market conditions. This agility can be enabled by having a complete and consistent view or single version of the truth of metrics aligned with corporate goals. By introducing a BI footprint within your company, opportunities are created to innovate in a wide variety of ways to make the organization more responsive, productive and profitable.