Friday, January 20, 2012

Top 7 Benefits of Acheiving Self-Service BI

Self-service BI is not just a buzz-word.  It is an approach to analytics that enables business users to analyze organizational information (i.e. create reports, make dash boards, perform ad-hoc analysis, configure alerts).  IT resources are not required on a continual basis to support end users, but rather only to set up the back-end (i.e. the data warehouse/data marts and related cubes underpinning the business intelligence system).  Further, if an existing back-end solution is available, IT may not be required at all!

Top 7 Benefits of Achieving Self-Service BI:
  • Enable business users to create personalized reports and conduct analysis without IT involvement
  • Free IT resources to focus on other tasks
  • Improve organizational decision making
  • Increase responce time to changes in the business environment
  • Improve allocation of resources
  • Reduce organizational risk
  • Improve organizational results

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Results of Combining Operational Models with Financial Budgets

This is the final blog entry in a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts. Click here to review part 2 or part 1 respectively.

Combining operational models that link key business drivers with your financial budgets provide the following results:
  • Significantly shorter budget/forecast cycles
  • Facilitates market environment vs. calendar driven re-forecasting to react to quickly to changes
  • Re-aligns financial planning focus
  • Facilitates insight between operational tactics and the financial forecast
  • Facilitates variance analysis at the operational and key driver level
  • Shifts professional resource time from collecting data and maintaining spreadsheets to analysis and decision making
Please browse this autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.