Turning information to insight, BI crucial for SMBs

By Simon Dale, senior vice-president, Business User Organisation, SAP Asia Pacific Japan | Jul 8, 2009

0 comments [1]

Delicious [2]

Digg [3]

Email [4]

Print [5]

Thumbnail: 

Small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) face operational challenges that are distinctly different from those of larger companies. It is how SMBs respond to such challenges that can mean the difference between their business’s success or failure.

Additionally, SMBs tend to have a much smaller margin of error than larger enterprises, making their decisions much more critical.

Let’s take a look at the unique challenges of the typical SMB:

• Growth: Without profitable and sustained growth, SMBs risk being made irrelevant by faster-growing competitors or being swallowed by larger companies. However, maintaining profitable growth is a balancing act for decision makers, who must control multiple levers. Consistently pulling the right levers requires clear insights into the business, as well as the external environment.
• Speed: More nimble processes are one of the biggest advantages that SMBs have over larger companies. But this speed can also hinder companies that react quickly, yet blindly. All business users must have visibility into what is working well so they can quickly capitalize on it — and what is not so they can rapidly address it.
• Focus: Unlike large enterprises, SMBs tend to sell a narrower range of products and services. This requires them to be even closer to their markets, products, and customers. Their continued success lies in getting everyone in the company working with complete visibility and clarity. Without this kind of focus, companies end up losing their momentum and have a hard time keeping a pulse on the market.
• Diligence: Due to the scale of their business, decision makers don’t have much room for error. They therefore need to be able to calculate and determine the future impact of any problem that surfaces so they can focus on the most important issues and make diligent and informed decisions.

With the challenges above, how then can SMBs see, think, and act clearly so that they can better understand their risks, formulate smart business strategies, and take actions that align with those strategies?

To make timely, well-informed decisions, you need just that: time and information. This means having fast access to accurate information from every department in your company, and time away from fighting fires to focus on priorities, problem solving, and market opportunities.

Why Is BI such a crucial consideration?

Business intelligence allows business users to better understand, analyze, and even predict what’s occurring within their company. With an integrated BI approach, organizations turn data from financial, manufacturing, and sales systems into useful and meaningful insights, enabling the distribution of information to those who need it, when they need it, so that everyone can make timely and better informed decisions.

To this end, BI solutions should provide every stakeholder within the company with complete visibility and clarity to help align strategy and operations. And perhaps most importantly, BI solutions enable profitable growth by providing in-depth analysis to decision makers.

What functionality should SMBs look for in their BI solution?

Comprehensive offerings allow organizations to choose from an array of functionality are often best for SMBs. These solutions should include:

• An ad hoc query tool that enables users to access quick, easy answers to questions like, “What were our total sales to XYZ Corporation last December?” or “How much of part 123 do we have in inventory?”
• Enterprise reporting capabilities that enable users to pull high-volume, high-resolution reports on a regular basis. These capabilities might also allow users to create sophisticated reports for distribution.
• Advanced analysis capabilities that allow users to view data across multiple classifications or dimensions and slice and dice that data to look at various combinations, such as the sales in each region for December or which products each customer purchased last year. Additional capabilities, such as filtering, can be used to include or exclude specific stores, regions, products, sales people, or time periods in this analysis.
• Dashboards that strongly complement query and reporting tools by showing information in a powerful, visual manner. These graphical gauges make it more intuitive for users, who can then quickly identify exceptions. Dashboards also display performance metrics and allow users to drill down to the underlying detail.
• Information management technologies that make it easy to pull relevant information from various operational systems. Ideally, data integration and data quality functionalities should allow end users to see where the data come from and how it’s being used, ensuring greater insight and clarity.

Success in the new economic reality

In summary, SMBs should look out for a simple, intuitive BI solution which will allow all users to access information through dashboards and integration with Microsoft Office, for example, as well as through offline support and mobile device deployment options. Additionally, the solution’s BI platform and powerful data integration and data quality management capabilities must ensure reliable and trusted information access.

In an uncertain economy, the right BI tools can provide business users with the information they need from their data systems to make smarter decisions, and can provide executives with the insight they need to drive the company toward success in the new economic reality.