As of now, Big-data has already created a lot of buzz across all industries. An organization has to handle various types of data like financial, personnel, accounting, sales and lots more.
These lists are endless. To discover information that could help in the better decision making process or to identify new business opportunities from those endless sets of data, is one of the biggest challenges for an organization.
This challenge becomes more enormous for direct sales organisations.
In today’s Business intelligence dashboards, the end users of every sector follow an effective method of gaining greater insights into their business without the need to go back to the IT or business analysts to get more data.
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And those types of data information, business intelligence and knowledge in the hands of the sales and marketing team means growth for those departments.
Contents
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is the combination of various technologies, tools, applications and best practices that helps a business to integrate, collect, analyse and present raw data to an actionable and insightful business data.
Business intelligence is prepared with:
- Data Mining
- Querying and reporting
- Analytical processing
The major challenges for the direct dales companies :
- The business hierarchies need to be on top across all the brands.
- Taking longer to answer to critical business questions.
- Lot of person-hours wasted for preparing daily transaction report.
- Difficult to maintain the inventory for which the customers do not getting the right product in right time.
- Lack in customer satisfaction without good services.
- Preparation of the business report for board meeting.
- A single application could reduce technical support but impact planning flexibility thereby possibly reducing the performance and reliability.
- Individual multiple applications could provide the flexibility required by the individual brands but would increase development time, cost and continuous technical support.
- As per the need, a combined corporate view of actual, budgets and forecast scenarios must be taken care of.
- Reporting requirements to be based on each brand, zone, categories and time.
- Collect source files from the third party vendor.
- Send the report through mail & put into the drop-box.
- To build the excel report using ‘n’ number of sheets with separate dynamic report headers.
- Organizations who are struggling with such immense data, Business Intelligence(BI) is the right option for them. BI can help to identify new opportunities from those massive unstructured information; whose may be remain unnoticed.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou– Salesmate.
At Andolasoft we provide following supports to our clients.
- The data-warehouse solution has been implemented in MYSQL 5.1, and incorporates data from one principal source such as, Daily’s sales/order information.
MYSQL 5.1 provides extreme performance for large data warehouses, improves data warehouse performance, availability, and manageability by partitioning large tables. - Pentaho(Kettle) used as an Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) tool for loading data into the data warehouse from different data sources: Data consolidated from various data sources such as Flat files(csv, xls, txt) & OLTP databases.
- The data in the warehouse is being processed for reporting and analysis purposes. The data is accessed through Excel. Data can be captured by stylist, item, store, zone, accounting year, quarter and period, and brand and concept.
Reports:
- Pentaho, Excel & CSV Add-ons were used for the purpose of reporting and analysis.
- Reports could be generated for a specific stylist aggregation, i.e. zone, company, concept, brand, for a sequence day, week, quarter, or year.
- Reports could be generated for a specific time to know the information about the booked item.
- Reports could be generated to know the revenue income of the organization & compare with current MTD to Last MTD, like that current QTD & Last QTD.
Technologies That We Used:
- MYSQL 5.1
- Pentaho (Kettle)
- Pentaho (Mondrian) as an OLAP
- Excel & CSV Add-ons
Overall Benefits:
- Data Warehouse designed for analysis, pattern search and reporting has been created.
- Help to develop and deliver better forecasting: Answer ‘what if’ questions with a click of a button. Forecasting and planning can be conducted by taking existing data sets, applying theoretical projections and estimations to that information, to model and predict future outcomes.
- Eliminate guesswork: Business intelligence can provide more accurate historical data, real-time updates, synthesis between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive ‘what if?’ analysis,” eliminating the need to guesstimate.
- Get faster answers to any business queries
- Get key business metrics reports when and where we need them
- Identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities: BI allows firms to leverage customer data to build, refine and modify predictive models that help sales representatives to up-sell and cross-sell products at appropriate customer touch points.
- Manage better inventory
- See where your business has been, where it is now and where it is going: BI has been very successful at explaining what happened to the business over some defined period of time — for example, how many products were sold, through which party, in which geography, or by which customer segment
- Integrated budgeting & planning processes in a centralized web-based application.
Read Also: Data-Warehousing for Small & Medium Organizations
Implementation Of BI For A DS Organization
We at Andolasoft have expertise on building revenue, budgeting and forecasting data warehouse(DWH) to take care of the needs of each brand, timezone and category which minimizes both IT support and the technical expertise required by the management.
In the present market, the DWH reporting tools are expensive and beyond the affordability for the medium scale organizations. To cut down the cost, we provide well-formatted .xls & .csv file reports for the top management.
I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.
Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist
Salesforce, Houston, Texas
Conclusion:
One of the goals of business intelligence is to help the corporate executives, managers and other operational heads to take necessary data driven decisions for business.
Most of the companies use BI for cost-cutting, creating better business opportunities and identifying inefficient processes of business.
If you are in search of a better Business Intelligence software development service, you can contact us. Our Andolasoft expertise will help to develop a budgeting, revenue and forecasting data warehouse that helps in your business growth.
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