A dramatic shift in the business intelligence industry is taking place, one company at a time, around the world

BI allows you to share information with coworkers, customers, and business partners, enabling all parties to immediately make smarter business decisions. Your operational data is transformed into consistent, reliable information for reporting and analysis. Accessing you can then more effectively:

· Strengthen customer loyalty and partner relationships while gaining a significant competitive advantage in your industry

A dramatic shift in the business intelligence industry is taking place, one company at a time, around the world. Top performing companies are turning to business intelligence (BI) from Business Objects to enable their employees, partners, and customers to track, understand, and manage data that is vital to their enterprise performance. These businesses are placing high demands on business intelligence – they require powerful web query, reporting, and analysis; an advanced and complete suite of analytic applications; seamless connectivity to packaged applications, and an integrated, end-to-end BI suite. Some of the areas within business intelligence are described below.

Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn't live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn't do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP's true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments' particular needs.

That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other. That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly.

Take a customer order, for example. Typically, when a customer places an order, that order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and rekeyed into different departments' computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one in the company truly knows what the status of the order is at any given point because there is no way for the finance department, for example, to get into the warehouse's computer system to see whether the item has been shipped. "You'll have to call the warehouse" is the familiar refrain heard by frustrated customers.

The economy is not going to bail us out. Customers will continue to buy carefully from an abundant worldwide supply. Result: continued pressure for businesses to perform well at lower cost. Just be careful not to damage customer service in pursuit of short-term cost savings. Strong relationships can be a differentiator, but not equally so for all companies in all industries. Senior executives must carefully evaluate their competitive position along with their personal readiness to drive a customer-centric business strategy. CRM is not always the answer. A supply chain is a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution of these finished products to customers. Supply chains exist in both service and manufacturing organizations, although the complexity of the chain may vary greatly from industry to industry and firm to firm.

Supply chain management (SCM) is the oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. Supply chain management involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies. It is said that the ultimate goal of any effective supply chain management system is to reduce inventory (with the assumption that products are available when needed). As a solution for successful supply chain management, sophisticated software systems with Web interfaces are competing with Web-based application service providers, who promise to provide part or all of the SCM service for companies who rent their service.

"Corporate Performance Management" or CPM for short. Initially coined by Gartner, the Stamford, Connecticut-based research and advisory firm, they use the term to describe "the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise. Business Performance Management (BPM) is the next generation of business intelligence (BI). It's about responding quickly to a market that used to be more predictable.

BPM includes a set of methodologies and processes that help businesses effectively plan, measure, analyze and optimize business performance throughout the enterprise.

BPM is focused on automating strategic business processes such as financial planning and forecasting. With BPM, enterprises bring data in from multiple sources, consolidate it, offer it up to a wide audience of users, analyze it, and then react to the data's implications.

The BPM market is growing fast. According to the IDC research firm, BPM is growing at a 24% Compound Annual Growth (CAGR), from $6.9B in 2000 to $19.9B in 2005. (From "Perspectives" research report from SG Cowen entitled "Business Performance Management -- Expanding Beyond One-off Business Intelligence Systems," January 2002.)

BPM processes include:

· Key performance indicators (KPIs), scorecards, dashboards, and alerts that monitor performance against operational targets

· Interactive decision-making across all levels of the enterprise that aligns individual targets with strategic objectives

· Profitability analysis of the company, business-units, products, channels and customers

Enterprises are realizing how important it is to "know what they know" and be able to make maximum use of the knowledge. This knowledge resides in many different places such as: databases, knowledge bases, filing cabinets and peoples' heads and are distributed right across the enterprise. All too often one part of an enterprise repeats work of another part simply because it is impossible to keep track of, and make use of, knowledge in other parts. Enterprises need to know:

Most traditional company policies and controls focus on the tangible assets of the company and leave unmanaged their important knowledge assets.

Success in an increasingly competitive marketplace depends critically on the quality of knowledge, which organizations apply to their key business processes. For example the supply chain depends on knowledge of diverse areas including raw materials, planning, manufacturing and distribution. Likewise product development requires knowledge of consumer requirements, new science, new technology, marketing etc.

The challenge of deploying the knowledge assets of an organization to create competitive advantage becomes more crucial as:

· The marketplace is increasingly competitive and the rate of innovation is rising, so that knowledge must evolve and be assimilated at an ever-faster rate.

· Corporations are organizing their businesses to be focused on creating customer value. Staff functions are being reduced, as are management structures. There is a need to replace the informal knowledge management of the staff function with formal methods in customer aligned business processes.

· Competitive pressures are reducing the size of the workforce, which holds this knowledge.

· Knowledge takes time to experience and acquire. Employees have less and less time for this.

· There are trends for employees to retire earlier and for increasing mobility, leading to loss of knowledge.

· There is a need to manage increasing complexity as small operating companies a re trans-national sourcing operations.

· A change in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area. A subsequent reversal in policy may then lead to a renewed requirement for this knowledge, but the employees with that knowledge may no longer be there.

DIFFERENT VENDORS FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

This includes some of the vendors for business intelligence and also the kind of work done by them.

· American Red Cross: The American Red Cross is America’s most trusted charity in its third century of service. It is the world’s largest, most efficient blood banking database, and uses Business Objects solutions to monitor its blood inventory. For example, using business intelligence, The American Red Cross can determine how much blood is available in its 36 regions across the United States. This information is critical when disaster strikes because the American Red Cross needs to know how much blood and the types of blood that are available. In addition, business intelligence helps the American Red Cross strengthens its management decisions concerning the manufacturing of all its blood products. Business Objects provides both the regional blood centers, and the national headquarters management with easy access to information about blood products inventory, financials, and human resources management.

· PepsiCo, Inc.: PepsiCo is a world leader in convenient foods and beverages, with 2000 revenues of over $25 billion and more than 135,000 employees. PepsiCo uses Business Objects as its Enterprise reporting standard. More than 6,000 users across the Accounting, Finance, Front Office, Human Resources, Information Technology, Manufacturing, Operations, Purchasing, Quality, Research and Development, Sales, and Supply Chain functional areas spanning multiple divisions rely on Business Objects solutions.

By creating an Enterprise Business Intelligence Environment that is easily scaleable and extendable, it makes it very easy for new projects to "plug-in" to the existing business intelligence environment. This provides project teams the ability to leverage a common enterprise infrastructure, support, and consulting team that are already in place. Project teams can then build experience in one tool suite, and focus on creating business solutions for their functional customers, rather than learning new tools and building and supporting separate infrastructures. The ability this environment provides enables PepsiCo to significantly decrease overall costs and shorten "customer solution" delivery time.

· Pfizer Inc: Pfizer Inc is one of the world’s largest drug manufacturers and a Fortune 500 company. The Research and Development arm of Pfizer Inc, Pfizer Global Research and Development (PGRD), is in the process of a global deployment of Business Objects 5i to support the timely and effective distribution of information in the enterprise. Pfizer has made a commitment to Business Objects as a reporting and business intelligence solution. Managers within the organization will be able to access information regarding budgeting, resource management, finance, and procurement. This information will allow them to more effectively manage the over 4 billion spent on R&D each year in the drug discovery and development process.

· The Principal Financial Group: The Principal Financial Group is a global provider of financial services and products. The company’s Group National Accounts division uses Business Objects solutions to provide an extranet to its corporate customers that allow them to obtain an improved understanding and control of their medical benefits. National Accounts customers, who are large employers with self-funded medical plans, enjoy several benefits from access to the extranet. To begin with, customers now have direct access via the Internet to important data about their medical benefits program. They can view information related to total claims, claims per region or business unit, historical costs, and number of instances in which employees receive care outside the network. Access to this information helps companies identify trends that may be costly to their business and make changes to their benefits plan to makes sure their plan is effective from both a benefits and cost standpoint.

· Sumitomo Corporation: Sumitomo Corporation, the world’s 15th largest company and one of Japan’s largest trading companies, uses Business Objects as its enterprise-reporting standard. Sumitomo Corporation relies on Business Objects solutions to create reports that are distributed via its Global Management Cockpit (GMC), the company’s business intelligence system, to hundreds of executives on a monthly basis. The GMC is Sumitomo Corporation’s innovative corporate portal designed to give managers immediate access to key business metrics across several hundred subsidiaries and geographic regions. Data from more than 700 consolidated subsidiaries, spreading across 190 worldwide regions is available to over 500 managers throughout Sumitomo Corporation. By making the information available to Sumitomo Management in a cockpit format, the top executives of the company will have self-services access to a consistent and accurate view of their business.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

DIFFERENT VENDORS FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

SOME OF THE SUCCESS STORIES OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE