Companies in every industry rely on information to make decisions. Often, the information they need is difficult to obtain because it either does not reside in their departmental systems or is fragmented across different applications. Although company functions such as sales, marketing, operations, finance, and human resources are interconnected, the data they produce and store is not. For a business to achieve optimal performance, information has to flow across functional boundaries. For example, sales, marketing, and service professionals need information from finance, HR, and manufacturing to help them better manage customers.
Sponsored By Oracle
Many organizations today use a collection of BI tools and applications to allow experts to gather information from a variety of sources, analyze it, and share it with managers and staff. However, ever-increasing business dynamics and increased competition mean businesses now require a much higher level of value from their BI investments. BI must now help drive profitable growth, change, and many other operational and financial performance goals. Not only does BI need to deliver significant return on investment (ROI), but it also needs to be deployed in a manner that minimizes total cost of ownership (TCO).
Sponsored By Oracle
All business transactions have a start point and an end point, which may well be simultaneous, yet relational database systems usually leave handling time to the application builder and rarely go further than allowing each transaction to be time and date stamped. It is not just business transactions that can change but also reference data or dimensional data in data warehouses too. Which product was sold, to which customer, and from which store? Indeed, changing reference data goes right to the heart of the problem since this defines the context of the business transaction. It is even more important that this reference data be time stamped and its time dependence stored. Worse, this reference data can and does change: products are reclassified, stores reorganized into different regions, customers grouped in differing ways by marketing departments. Again, most application builders pay little attention to this fact.
Sponsored By Teradata Aster
Lean data warehousing is a process of monitoring and assessing business activity and data usage to deliver increased operational efficiency, ensure scalability of both infrastructure and available IT resources and reduce data management costs.
Sponsored By Appfluent Technology
Lean data warehousing is a process of monitoring and assessing business activity and data usage to deliver increased operational efficiency, ensure scalability of both infrastructure and available IT resources and reduce data management costs.
Sponsored By Appfluent Technology
The need for timely and succinct business intelligence (BI) continues to grow as executives demand critical information to seize opportunities faster than competitors and to address potential problems in the making. Increasingly, it is not just C-level executives and upper management who need access to business intelligence.
Sponsored By SAP
Why are so many companies launching mobile applications? The growth of mobility in the enterprise has been an eventful journey so far. In only a short time, it has moved from the preserve of senior executives and dedicated mobile field staff to have a much wider applicability as workers across functions and job roles bring their personal mobile technologies to work.
Sponsored By SAP
When the economy slows, many businesses react by retrenching and cutting costs in order to weather the downturn. Although such cost reduction is important, companies often overlook equally critical strategic decisions –- opportunities to use valuable business information to strengthen product and service offerings and emerge ahead of the competition.
Sponsored By SAP