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What is the fastest and easiest way to implement a BI solution for a small client?
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10 Answers
Business Intelligence can go in a number of directions. One of the hardest things for businesses, to do, especially small businesses, is to focus on what the objective of the project is. This is imperative for a successful project.
As it relates to a BI project, the first thing is to determine their requirements. There are many business intelligence solutions available, with varying functioanlity and varying price points. In order to acheive a fast and easy implementation for a BI solution, or any other software solution for that matter, is to have the business define what they are looking to get out of the solution. This includes defining what reports, analytics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and key risk indicators (KRIs) they need to meet their objectives.
That brings us to the next area where many companies tend to lose focus. When defining reports, KPIs, and KRIs many business try to make one report that can do everything and give them everything. As a result, the report actually provides them nothing or very little valuable information. It is incredibly important for this not to happen, and instead make each report, KPIs, and KRIs as specific as possible. By making the it specific, the end-user can get exactly the information they need when they need it.
Many of these tasks may seem overwhelming for a business to take on themself. Depending on the definition of "small business", I would recommend the small business bring in a company that has experience and knowledge in BI and can help guide them in making the right choice and in defining the requirements.
Thanks,
Laurence
www.discretemanufacturingerp.com
www.tlcgroupinc.com
Hi Enyinnaya,
There are plenty of turn key BI solutions out there. i generally sell and work with IBM cognos bi for small business, entry cost for our offering tends to be about 20-25k. Other offerings are less but tools and functionality in those offerings. it really depends what you need in terms of that business BI needs.
I hope that helps guide you in the direction you need to go.
Steve
Hi Enyinnaya
Regardless of platform, "gamification" and incentives are two very effective methods to get BI adopted in a small organization. People intuitively understand the premise that "knowledge shared is power lost" and while it is clear to everyone why BI would benefit the business, its quite unclear how BI benefits individuals (more work-- little or no recognition). Even well-constructed ROI cases can fail to persuade middle management in the face of forcing profound changes in behavior. Showing individual employees how they can personally profit from the information generated by a successful a BI initiative will accelerate a successful deployment.
Free is always a good price point for small businesses and gives them a way to test the waters of a BI platform before investing a large amount of money into a solution that may not work for them, due to complexity for example.
Yurbi Community (www.yurbi.com) provides a free solution for small businesses and includes access to 1 datasource, 1 user which can build an unlimited set of reports and dashboards, and 5 reports which anyone in the organization can access to do analysis, printing, and exporting.
For organizations that need more report builders, datasources, security, and other features it is very affordable to purchase licenses and upgrade to Yurbi Team Edition via buy.yurbi.com.
Thanks,
David
Even in the case of extremely small businesses, a strategic deployment of a Business Intelligence solution can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company.
Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes.
Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.
A BI solution is fundamental to find answers to the seven layers of WHY's in order to get to the root cause of issues. Being able to understand and correct these issues faster than the competition provides the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is.
In the past deploying a BI solution was not affordable by small companies, not only due to licensing cost but also because the internal and external resources needed for set-up and maintenance.
This situation has changed though. Today, there are many new analytics applications, either on premise or in the cloud, that are powerful, user friendly and very cost effective; making them ideal to bring small companies to the forefront of the 21st century technology to become true analytic competitors. http://blog.strat-wise.com/2011/08/04/what-is-bi-30.aspx
Regards, Bill
Even a small client needs a solid architecture. It all starts with the data warehouse (integrating data from sources, 1 version of the truth, history, etc). And DW normally is not the easy/cheap part, unless you use Data Warehouse Automation Software.
Thank you all for your response, i really appreciate
Look to the cloud my friend! Birst, Indicee, Pivotlink, Microstrategy, SAP, and others have low cost BI solutions. Then, try some visual analysis tools like Tableau or Visual Insight from MicroStrategy. Finally, look to an industry reseller. They might have some packaged applications geared to SMB.
Sorry mate but this is the wrong question. All companies would like to have their BI solutions implemented 'fast and easy' but not all of them can as the answer to this questions is very much dependant on an earlier question which is 'what is the company trying to achieve' and what is the value of the business justificaiton to this 'need'. The bigger the return the easier will be the decision to spend more on the solution.
Cheers, Shim.
You cannot implement a software solution "fast and easy" without making some compromises that might cost you later. And talking about a BI solution, the fact that you have to be able to analyze all the data in your company requires that this software is well integrated with other systems you might use, so it could get accurate data fast and without risking errors/ data loss on the way.
I`ve been playing with a BI solution developed on Tableau Software`s platform and it`s pretty neat, great visuals, intuitive for a not very technical person ( they also have a free version for personal use on their website, if you wanna try it ), but as I said before, the accuracy of the data is crucial before getting to enjoy in-depth analysis and other cool stuff a BI system can do.
Best of luck,
Stephanie
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