Informed Decision-Making Based on Data
Business Intelligence (BI) enables better decision-making based on facts. It enables your organization to acquire a clear understanding of market behavior and commercial context. There are common questions that most companies have:
- What are the best selling products?
- How does this quarter's sales compare with last quarter?
- Where are the top sales dollars generated?
- Who are the bottom 5 employees based on profitability?
These types of questions can be answered by providing a way for business data to be structured in a way to enable the retrieval of related information. Crowell Solutions enables organizations to use Business Intelligence technology offerings as a means to provide this type of intelligence capability.
Business Intelligence Architecture
Source Systems
Most companies have distributed stores of data pertaining to the respective departments. Sales departments typically have metrics related to sales and performance. Inventory warehouses deal with their own set of metrics in relation to physical products or assets. These differing sources of data make up the business intelligence landscape for the company.
Data Staging Area
The different source data that comprise the company's business information need to eventually be stored in a data warehouse. There is a process called Extract Transform and Load (ETL) that facilitates means of formatting data from different sources so that they can be loaded into a data warehouse structure.
Data Warehouse
The varying forms of data get stored in a Data Warehouse. The Data Warehouse is the structure that facilitates the main work of business intelligence - reporting and analysis. Bits of data are structured in a way to facilitate flexible matrices that ultimately can be configured to display data in multiple dimensions by utilizing the concept of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). This concept provides a configurable structure to analyze data.
User Interface
The business intelligence analysis can materialize in several different ways. Web-based applications can display information dashboards that display information. The data can also be accessed through reports generated by report writers. Custom applications can also display this data as well and any type of Ad-Hoc Query tools.