I couldn't resist another winter themed post on Business Intelligence.
While those of us who are less technically inclined may enjoy the picture below, those who design and develop data marts and data warehouses are very familiar with both the snowflake and star schema.
One popular truth regarding snowflakes is that no two snowflakes are identical. When it comes to Business Intelligence, no two organization's needs are identical either.
Enjoy the winter beauty of stars and snowflakes this season - and let us take care of data structure underpinning your Business Intelligence solution. You'll be happy you did!
If you have kids, you'll agree that one of the top things on their minds this season is what they want for Christmas.
But what about the retailers and organizations who are hoping to make the best of this Christmas season? How can they best predict what products to stock up on?
I know from first-hand experience, that my favourite winter tire brand seems to always be 'sold-out' by mid-December - what if they could better predict demand and optimize their production and supply chain to fulfill more requests?
From a BI perspective, the answer lies in the predictive power of data mining. One real world predictive analytics and data mining solution called Sentinel Mining is based on the Ph. D. thesis by TARGIT CTO Dr. Morten Middelfart. Check it out!
Kyle McNerney of TARGIT has kindly put together a 20 minute overview of TARGIT BI, the leading BI/analytics solution for Dynamics ERP.
Click here to register and view.
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
Tell me, just how many executives, business analysts and other BI end users are excited by the deep technical knowledge and time it takes to properly develop and maintain the backend of a BI solution, namely a data warehouse, the extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and finally the cubes themselves? But without a good backend for your BI solution, even the best dashboarding and BI/analytics solution available (i.e. TARGIT BI) will not be able to provide the information that your organization needs to for analysis and effective performance management.
TimeXtender simplifies the administration of the BI backend so that your organization can realize the value of its chosen analytics/visualization solution.
This is also part of the reason Jet Reports partnered with TimeXtender in their Jet Enterprise offering. Read the interview with Joe Little, President of Jet Reports, here.
TARGIT BI has been recently recognized in a BARC research study as the most widespread BI solution used due to ease of use and product functionality. For a summary of the results of this study, please click here.
The following Top 7 Reasons to choose TARGIT Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM were presented at BDO's annual user conference on May 12, 2011:
1) Easy to Use
2) Highly Interactive
3) Enables ‘Power Users’
4) Unique CALM/OODA Philosophy
5) Consolidate Reporting across Multiple Data Sources
6) Enterprise Level Solution
7) Better Performance
The following are a few key aspects from what I presented.
My take on how BI has evolved and how the level of insight has increased over time
An introduction to the Performance Management Pyramid or my explanation of what it takes for an organization to successfully implement and utilize a CPM solution
An introduction to TARGIT's unique CALM or OODA philosophy, which is embedded into their entire solution
A sample TARGIT dashboard
Please contact me for more information on how TARGIT might revolutionize BI in your organization and/or visit http://www.targit.com/
