Business Intelligence Consulting

Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence are the main resources for success in future business worlds. Working harder is not enough. Working smarter is necessary.

What is Business Intelligence? Our definition of Business Intelligence is the process of providing insights that will enable business managers to make tactical decisions, as well as to establish, modify, or tune the business strategies and business processes in order to gain competitive advantage, improve business operations and profitability, and generally achieve whatever goals management has set.

Business intelligence seeks to give business leaders a tactical advantage in business just as military intelligence works to give armies and generals an upper hand on the battlefield. Business intelligence transforms your organization's operational data into high-value information (called a data warehouse) and distributes the right information in the right way to the right people at the right time.

In both business and military operations, the correlation between the quality of intelligence and the success of operations is clear: those who comprehend and act quickly upon relevant information about facts have advantages over those who do not. The added value of business intelligence can therefore be huge.

Let us take a look at some questions that Business Intelligence can help answer: try to answer the following questions to see whether your information systems provide you with business intelligence tools you need to accomplish the following tasks quickly, easily, and directly. Answer "No" if you depend on others to procure information or if your business and performance measurements lag after the fact.

Revenues and profitability

I can identify the products, services, and channels driving my revenue and profit.
I can rank customers and customer locations by profitability.
I am automatically alerted when critical costs, such as non-billable overtime rates, fall out of control.
I know when my sales managers are off target, and I can intervene in time to make a difference.

Customer relationship management

I can identify low-value customers and try to improve their value or design them out of my business.
I am able to spot customer relationship problems early by monitoring leading satisfaction indicators, such as product or service quality.

Sales and marketing

I'm able to target high-value customers in order to lower my marketing risk.
I'm able to rank the success of product promotions to know what's effective by product and market segment.
I know what's in my sales pipeline.

Finance

I can identify underutilized assets.
I'm confident that I have the facts to make the right capital asset choices in next year's budget.
My budgets are based on accurate histories and current trends, not on pie-in-the-sky figures, guesses, or sandbagged numbers.

Supply chain

I can easily identify how much I'm spending with each supplier and use that information to negotiate lower costs.
I know which carriers are most often damaging my shipments (and on which routes) and/or delivering them late to my customers.
I'm able to predict product demand and trade that information for more cash and less inventory.

Strategy management

My employees view individualized key performance indicators, aligning them with the corporate strategy.
My employees have instant access to a knowledge base of information that helps them to do their job.

Human resources

I'm able to use leading indicators to preempt health and safety incidents.
I have the leading information required to measure and manage employee satisfaction and increase employee retention.

If you answered "Yes" to many of these questions, your business is likely an intelligent organization becoming an e-business intelligence. You possess superior intelligence regarding your employees, customers, partners, and operations. People at all levels can manage their own affairs, have intimate knowledge of your organization's strategy, and know where to find information needed for further analysis quickly and directly.

But if you answered "No" to many or most of these questions or similar questions, your business processes may move too slowly. You'll likely have increasing difficulty maintaining a grip on your customers, prices, profitability, and employees as more-enterprising companies leverage business intelligence, information technology, improve their business processes, and capture market share. If that is the challenge you are facing, call us and let us help you.