You want your manufacturing or distribution business to have a competitive edge, right? Try business intelligence.
Every manufacturing and distribution business owner and manager struggles at some point to get the information they need, in the proper format, on time and securely from their financial systems.
The inability to access critical information, on demand, about your business operations can have a crippling effect. It can prevent you from making informed decisions about company direction. It can tie up your staff’s valuable time, preventing them from focusing on key business initiatives, because they have to focus on manual procedures. Perhaps most critical, you can lose your competitive advantage in the marketplace.
To be successful, a business needs to constantly reinvent itself. It’s important to have software tools in place that are agile and can adapt to innovative thinking. That’s where business intelligence (BI) systems, sometimes known as decision support systems (DSS), come into play.
What Is Business Intelligence?
According to Wikipedia, “Business intelligence is defined as the ability for an organization to take all its capabilities and convert them into knowledge, ultimately, getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, via the right channel. This produces large amounts of information, which can lead to the development of new opportunities for the organization. When these opportunities have been identified and a strategy has been effectively implemented, they can provide an organization with a competitive advantage in the market, and stability in the long run.”
What information would you like to access more easily? Perhaps it’s something small within your organization, like the sales report not being in the proper format every week and having to export it to Excel and recalculate the figures. Perhaps you have to export a report from your ERP application and manually calculate a commission report in Excel because the system doesn’t calculate properly.
These small things, when added up, waste countless staff hours and have a high margin for error. Do you accept these situations simply because the system can’t handle it, or do you replace your system that otherwise works fine?
Let’s suppose you have disparate systems to handle different areas of your business. Wouldn’t it be nice to combine information from different business segments into one usable dashboard or report for users across your organization to share? After all, you are one company. Why shouldn’t you and other people in the business be able to look at one central view of your manufacturing or distribution business?
There are tools that can help you collect important key information about your business. With collaboration and business intelligence tools like Microsoft SharePoint Online, Office 365, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, and your financial ERP and operation applications of choice, making information available anywhere, anytime, to any audience (owners, employees, customers, vendors / suppliers, prospects), and in virtually any format should be a given.
Now it’s up to you to envision what you want to see, who you want to see it, and when you want them to see it. Then, get your BI tool belt ready, and work on building the competitive analysis tools to advance your business.
How to Get Started With Business Intelligence
- Understand your business and what information you use to make decisions (e.g., actuals, budgets, competitive industry KPIs, etc.).
- Determine each system you have and the type of database that each of the applications uses.
- Design or envision in your mind the type of information you are missing from each one of these systems, or all of them. Decide whether you want information combined from multiple databases into one report or dashboard view.
- Decide how you want the information delivered. Via a report you could run in a browser? Automatically delivered via email? Via a dashboard view of operations combining information with graphs? Design on paper how the information will be displayed.
- Decide who should have access to the information, both within and outside of your organization.
- Find a qualified business intelligence expert and have them plan the design of your BI project using the proper toolset.
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