LESSON - Integrating Business Reporting and Analysis
By Fred Richards, Senior Director of Marketing Programs, MicroStrategy
Leading organizations have recognized the benefits of putting information into the hands of all their employees, regardless of job title or function. And, aware of it or not, business users rely on business intelligence to make better business decisions and streamline operations. Here’s how specific people within a company use an integrated BI solution to report, analyze, and monitor business performance. Consider these scenarios:
Executive
A vice president of sales can receive sales performance reports by subscribing to a schedule-driven distribution service that e-mails her weekly sales reports. After a review of one such weekly report on regional sales, the vice president notices that the sales for one store have dropped significantly from previous weeks. She can click on some lower-than-expected figures and immediately drill to the underlying data, which shows that three best-selling products are surprisingly underperforming. She can also monitor sales performance by accessing an executive dashboard with visually compelling tables, graphs, gauges, and other graphical indicators optimized for the executive’s quick absorption.
Manager
A store manager can receive daily store performance reports generated by the report distribution engine. After discovering an issue, the store manager can click on the report to quickly delve deeper into the issue and drill into that area of the data to which he has permission. This particular store manager can compare his store’s sales results against the sales plan, against sales results at other stores like his, and against previous years’ seasonal patterns. As a Web user, the manager can view trend indicators as well as create and adjust metrics and perform new calculations to refine his analysis.
Analyst
An analyst is able to build her own reports that display data across all regions and stores with advanced metrics. The analyst can investigate past regional performance with statistical analysis and generate powerful predictive analysis on future quarter performance. The analyst can create reports that empower executives and managers to continuously monitor sales performance.
In all three scenarios, users can report, analyze, and monitor the data to uncover problems, make intelligent decisions, and preserve their company’s exceptional level of performance. MicroStrategy is the first and only business intelligence architecture to unify reporting, analysis, and real-time monitoring into one seamless experience for the business user, into one efficient and scalable architecture for the IT professional, and into one economical and extensible utility for the CIO.
The key to driving better and more predictable business performance is to deliver timely and actionable information to the hands of every person throughout the enterprise. MicroStrategy delivers a range of world-class capabilities for reporting, analyzing, and continuously monitoring business performance.
- Report the detailed information needed by everyone for day-to-day decision making. MicroStrategy reporting delivers detailed data on current and historical performance to users across the enterprise. An intuitive user interface and Web reporting allows businesses to deliver insight to everyone for better decision-making, every day.
- Analyze data to uncover root causes and trends in business performance. Provide detailed insight into the business from many different angles so that managers can uncover the causes of performance problems, identify opportunities, and predict results. Users leverage the advanced analysis to reveal reasons for performance peaks or aberrations.
- Monitor the performance of your organization at all levels and in real time. Companies should employ monitoring technology to constantly track business metrics. Users can then use their scorecards and dashboards to create actionable information and alerts about ongoing business activity. Users are empowered with up-to-the-minute information for their business decisions.