Reason 2: Make insightful decisions
The ability to make better decisions and proactively solve issues is crucial to success at every level of an organization, every day. And as companies grow or face stiffer competition, the need to make these decisions based on meaningful information quickly becomes an imperative. Most businesses need to be agile and responsive, identifying and acting upon market trends in order to gain and maintain a competitive edge. This is where traditional financial reports, summaries that are not drillable and manually-manipulated spreadsheets start to fall short. ‘Loose’ Excel spreadsheet use in particular becomes potentially dangerous as the trustworthiness and timeliness of information comes into question.
An integrated Business Intelligence solution successfully addresses the number one pain point of many business software end users – reporting that is inadequate and inflexible – making it a necessity in today’s aggressive market place. Reports that are delivered weeks overdue in a format that is rigid, impractical and disjointed cannot provide the intelligence necessary for insightful decision-making. And while the volume of information that needs to be processed continues to grow, time and resources are limited. The focus needs to shift from capturing lots of data, to providing accessible information that gives you a clear understanding of the transactional history in your database, so you can forecast and plan for the coming years based on a clear picture of the financial footprint of your past.
BI can provide real-time automated reports, executable at the click of a button, which draw up-to-date trusted data directly from a company’s existing accounting package and deliver a single version of the truth. The data has always been there, but BI puts it into an easily digestible format and gets the right information to the right people, when they need it. Even better is when the data is delivered in pre-formatted Excel reports and dashboards that can be drilled down into for transactional details. Excel-based BI allows businesses to continue to use Excel as their preferred data sharing application but eliminates ‘spreadsheet chaos’. No more cutting and pasting repetitively, no more human error, no more doubt about data accuracy. Operational teams can now easily customize, manipulate and distribute meaningful information in the familiar face of Excel, while maintaining its accuracy, obtaining insight into trends, year-on-year analyses and drill-down transactional details, all on demand and in a meaningful format. BI paves the way for true collaboration across a business so more people have access to information they need to make smart, strategic decisions, faster. Teams can collaborate more effectively, people are more productive, and decision-makers are more proactive.
