Description
Strategic And Financial Performance Using Business Intelligence Solutions
1297
STRATEGIC AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE USING
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTIONS
Boldeanu Dana Maria
Academia de Studii Economice Bucureúti, Facultatea Contabilitate úi Informatic? de Gestiune, Pia?a
Roman? nr. 6, sector 1, Bucureúti, CP 010374, Email: [email protected], Telefon: 0721803603
In order to achieve better strategic goals, business intelligence has to provide employees with the right
information at the right time. To make this happen, a business intelligence solution should be
comprehensive, secure, integrated with all operational systems (in both ways, as capture of data and as
feed-back is concerned) and always available. In concrete terms, business intelligence process manages to
help decision makers by providing data models, statistical analysis and forecasting for comprehensive data
analysis. Improved sales and financial performance is a major objective of a global sourcing strategy.
The research is trying to present the way of transforming existing data, gathered from different data
sources in powerful managerial information, integrating “business intelligence” solutions in Romanian’s
companies, with the help of some famous companies which create BI products.
Keywords: Business Intelligence, business performance management, decision support systems.
Introduction
Today, the time available for making operative decisions in a business environment is decreasing:
decisions must be made within days or even hours. Just two decades, similar decisions still took weeks or
months (Tiemeyer, 1995).
The process of decision making, regardless of the size of the company, is a rather complex one, implying
data processing, information and knowledge. Usually, the data inputted in the IT systems of the company
are very numerous, sometimes heterogeneous or provided from heterogeneous sources, are widespread into
the system, and their transforming in information which can be analyzed for taking decisions is, in most
cases, a lengthy and difficult process. The data warehouse (DW) and business intelligence (BI) systems, as
well as the Decisions Support Systems (DSS) are designed to help the companies to answer in real time to
complex questions. There are more different techniques in this respect, and the choice of the right
instrument leads to finding the relevant answers for a certain company. The process is a dynamic one, and
these answers are changing along with the business strategy of the respective company.
Many organizations do not have well-developed global sourcing measurement strategies in place, and
thereby lose out on attractive business opportunities. Realizing these opportunities requires a detailed
understanding of global sourcing performance, which can be facilitated through Business Intelligence (BI)
concepts applied in other areas of supply chain management.
The present article is structured in two parts, which include:
• a presentation about the significance of business intelligence (BI), why is so important to have a
business intelligence solution in your company, what can we do with a BI solution and which are the
types of problems that BI can resolve;
• the second part describes some BI solutions used in these days in Romanian companies.
1. Business Intelligent – overview and importance
It is difficult to give an exact definition to a complex solution which can vary depending on the analyzed
context. In an abstract way, it can be said that BI is the process of „combining” the information from
several sources, and presenting the result in a form which can be used in taking the business decisions. This
aspect is more obvious if we are going to analyze the iterative character of the business intelligence
processes, where the steps of analysis, planning and improvement need the harmonious join of the
information from the data base offered by the business intelligence with the right managerial decisions
taken on the basis of all this information.
1298
„Understanding the business or the intelligence of the business”, the translation mot-à-mot of the Business
Intelligence expression is obtained precisely though the analysis and refining of the data regarding the
operations of a company. It is a process which results from the data collected at the company level from
various internal activities (marketing, sales, production) and/or external (customer behavior or competition
behavior as a reaction to the internal activities). This collection is iterative and cyclical and this is why the
collected data should be organized to facilitate their transformation in information (reports, queries,
analyses or presentations). The final purpose of these processes is a set of decisions which affect the
functioning and the productivity of any business, and the solutions which sustain this process are extremely
important and have decisive effects, but they cannot guarantee the effect if a lot of elements
(organizational, technical, procedural) are not properly set up.
BI applications include the activities of decision support, query and reporting, online analytical processing
(OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining” (Sauder School of Business, 2000).
A business intelligence solution brings information to the hand of the users that need it: analysts and
experts (multidimensional analysis, statistics), consumers (dynamic queries and simple analysis) and
information users (reports). (Microsoft, 2004)
According to a study published by Data Warehousing Institute in 2000, (Data Warehousing Institute,
2000), named: “Harnessing Customer Information for Strategic Advantage: Technical Challenges and
Business Solutions” the technologies DATA WAREHOUSE and BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE allow the
companies to collect, to integrate and to analyze the information related to customers so that this will
enable the companies to understand the intentions and the behavior of the customers. Being aware of these
information and knowledge flows, the companies can optimize the interaction with the customers at all
levels, which will lead directly to the increase of revenues and profit.
BI applications allow the ability for aggregate and summaries on specific and detailed categories at the
same time. As part of the analysis of different processes, these kinds of applications show exact
information and expel moreover elements. Thus, the managerial team can monitor the business
performance variables. As an example of the various categories of variables, which we can see in the table
below, we can mention: the value or the volume of sales on a specific region (area), on product, on spell or
the rate of products return for different reasons, the rate of discard from the guarantee period, the analysis
of the customers behavior in a specific situation or in a predefined context.
Type of BI
application
Activities that can take place / Questions that can be answered
Product
analysis
• Which is the product which has the highest profit margin or the highest contribution
to the absolute value of the profit?
• Which are the products which bring the lowest profit margin (unprofitable products)?
Marketing
analysis
Demographical analysis using information about customers and sales data, price
sensitivity (elasticity of demand), consuming preferences. For example: • Which are the
products preferred by consumers belonging to the market segment with a monthly
income lower than a certain level?
Using this information we can estimate the efficiency of the publicity campaigns and of
the marketing activity.
Sales
analysis
Identifying trends, season analysis, and association of complementary products (buying
a package of products).
• Which is the sales tendency (trend) in the stores from a specific demographical area?
• Which are the products with growing sales and which are the customers that buy
products like these?
1299
Retail
analysis
Data analysis regarding retail orders, supplies analysis, stocks analysis.
Through these analysis it will be possible to estimate stocks better, to schedule
deliveries better, to make proposals for the price promotions for certain products and
for the delivery calendar.
Financial
analysis
The analysis of the profitability on departments, category of products, geographical
locations, seasonality. A particular case is represented by financial institutions (banks,
assurance companies) where the financial analysis plays a key part in carrying on the
activity: defining bank’s packages of products and services, scoring analysis as a
method of synthesizing of information about the financial situation of a certain
customer, in an aggregate criteria of evaluation as rating or score type on the basis of
which it is possible to obtain a credit facility
Budget
planning
The increase of the efficiency of a manufacture process by costs reduction, increasing
the production, planning the next fiscal year (forecasting the balance sheet of incomes
and expenses, cash-flow statement, etc)
Balanced
scorecard
Defining performance indicators from a specific area, calculated from the existing
information from the system. We can follow the entire performance of the company or
the performance of some groups as against others from the same area.
Project
management
analysis
The analysis of the resources way of allocation, analysis of projects portfolio.
Table 1 - Activities and questions in terms of BI application’s types
2. Business Intelligence solutions
Once we have distinguished the importance and benefits of BI, we can move on to present and point out
the features and attributes of specific BI solutions. In this way, we can say that in Romania the continuous
increasing of the competition between market sectors makes a must to adopt BI solutions adequate to the
business specificity. The companies are interested in finding out which are the best products on the market,
the most profitable customer and which are the new products they need to be more profitable. Alongside
competitively, as a generic element, to adopting BI solutions contributes also the necessity to optimize
processes and to take better decisions, the bigger volume of data accumulated in operational systems and
the European and international standards addressed to different industries.
We are going over some BI solutions presented also in Romania and trying to point out their strengths in
the area:
a) Microsoft is one of the companies which offer integrated, powerful and comprehensive solutions
of business intelligence which allow performing data mining analysis, reporting solutions with the
support of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Here
we talk about Microsoft SQL Server 2005, fated by his technical resources to provide new and
comprehensive possibilities of exploring data in order to offer companies an effectively
competitive advantage, to help taking decisions that will make it in direct advantage.
The solutions of business intelligence are conceived to include multiple data sources, from a large area of
operations, easy to integrate with the support of Integration Services ready to explore and improve data,
getting an integrating vision of all analyzed data and building extended business analysis as OLAP (On
Line Analytical Processing), data warehouse, data mining (finding patterns and applying them over the
business operations, using a flexible and accessible platform), tools for data extract, transform, and load
using multiple and different data sources (ETL tools), balanced scorecard, etc, with the support of Analysis
Services.
The SQL Server 2005 BI Workbench suite is made of five basic tools (Monaco, 2004):
• SQL Server Relational Database – used to create relational database;
• Analysis Services – used to create multidimensional model (measures, dimensions and schema);
1300
• Data Transformation Services (DTS) – used to extract, transform and load data from sources to the
data warehouse or schema;
• Reporting Services – used to build and manage enterprise reporting using the relational or
multidimensional sources;
• Data Mining – used to extract information based on predetermined algorithms.
Figure 1 - Analysis Services Architecture: relationships between different technologies levels involved in
Analysis Services (Source: processed after Monaco, 2004)
b) Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is the only BI product to deliver the complete range of BI
capabilities needed for corporate performance management: scorecarding, reporting, analysis,
dashboards, and business event management as well as data integration, on a single, service-
oriented architecture (SOA). Author, share, and use reports that draw on data across all enterprise
sources for better business decisions. (Cognos Corporation)
Complete BI capabilities in one product, BI platform contains: accessing quality data, system
administration and management, architecture and software environment. Both for the business and for IT
users the product includes a framework manager, an administration console and a good integration with
Microsoft Excel (Cognos Corporation).
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence has a lot of customers, over 23,000 and we can mention among other IBM,
Tyson Foods, Inc., BearingPoint, etc.
c) BISS – Business Intelligence Software Solutions, part of RomSys group offers a complete suite
of tools, named Business Objects Portal: Crystal reports, Web intelligence and OLAP intelligence.
Among BI platform products we can distinguish: BusinessObjects Enterprise, BI platform, Crystal
Report Explorer, BusinessObjects Auditor, etc.
Can
include
distinct
fields
and/or
data
marts
MS
SQL
Server
Oracle
Text
files
Operational
Data
Data
Warehouse
Star
Schema
OLAP
Cube
Browsers for
OLAP Cubes
Evaluation
Software
ProClarity,
Excel Pivot
Table, Web
components
from Office
ETL
DT
S
Analysis Services Architecture
1301
BI platform has a set of services for distributing and administrating business intelligence facilities. Users
facilities include access to business intelligence portal, ways of interacting with the shown content and the
administrating facilities must include security components, data access and audit.
The products and services of BusinessObjects Enterprise Information Manager allow the integration and
the improving of performances. Corporate performance management (CPM) is the area of business
intelligence involved with monitoring and managing an organization's performance, according to key
performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, return on investment (ROI), overhead, and operational
costs. For online businesses, CPM includes additional factors such as page views, server load, network
traffic and transactions per second. CPM is also known as business performance management (BPM) or
enterprise performance management (EPM).
Figure 2 - Performance management from Business Objects Platform
(Source:http://www.businessobjects.ro)
Each of the IT solutions presented above has its advantages, records an impressive number of customers
and is continuously developing from 1 day to another, through the addition of new packages of analyse and
reporting which to guide the persons in charge in order to take the best decision at the proper moment.
3. Conclusions
A Business Intelligence platform large enough to comprise and integrate all data, to analyze them and
report them in customized way can help any company to move from the desire to obtain performance to
action through better and faster decisions.
More and more business solutions are emerging and their efficiency is increasing, as they try to answer to a
larger number of questions about the performance of the companies. No matter what solution you may
choose, the business intelligent system must help the top management to make better, more informed
business decisions, to increase their competitive edge and to respond more quickly evolving customer
needs. Many advantages can rise from a BI solution wise chosen, so that the management will be able to
answer in real time to complex questions, to maximize profit and to take appropriate decisions based on all
relevant information and will also allow it to monitor the impact of its decisions with timely correction and
adjustments.
References
1. The Data Warehousing Institute (2000) Releases Comprehensive Industry Study on Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) - SEATTLE, Washington, available on-line athttp://www.tdwi.org/display.aspx?id=5140
2. Microsoft (2004) Solu?ia Microsoft pentru Business Intelligence, available on-line athttp://www.microsoft.com/Romania/Solutii/BI.mspx
1302
3. Monaco, G. T. (2004) An Introduction to OLAP in SQL Server 2005, available on-line athttp://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/21410
4. Murray, Janet Y., Kotabe, Masaaki and Wildt, Albert R. (1995) Strategic and financial
performance implications of global sourcing strategy: a contingency analysis, Journal of
International Business Studies, Vol. 26.
5. Sauder School of Business (2000) Glossary of Common IT Terms, available on-line at
www.sauder.ubc.ca/cgs/itm/itm_glossary.html
6. Tiemeyer, E. and Zsifkovitis, H.E. (1995) Information als Führungsmittel: Executive Information
Systems, Konzeption, Technologie, Produkte, Einführung, 1st edition, Munich, p. 95.
7. Vasile, Gabriel (2007), Creúterea competi?iei impune solu?ii de Business Intelligence, Revista
Market Watch, available on-line athttp://www.marketwatch.ro
8.http://www.businessobjects.ro
9.http://www.cognos.com – Cognos Corporation
10.http://www.microsoft.com
11.http://www.proclarity.com
doc_465621071.pdf
Strategic And Financial Performance Using Business Intelligence Solutions
1297
STRATEGIC AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE USING
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTIONS
Boldeanu Dana Maria
Academia de Studii Economice Bucureúti, Facultatea Contabilitate úi Informatic? de Gestiune, Pia?a
Roman? nr. 6, sector 1, Bucureúti, CP 010374, Email: [email protected], Telefon: 0721803603
In order to achieve better strategic goals, business intelligence has to provide employees with the right
information at the right time. To make this happen, a business intelligence solution should be
comprehensive, secure, integrated with all operational systems (in both ways, as capture of data and as
feed-back is concerned) and always available. In concrete terms, business intelligence process manages to
help decision makers by providing data models, statistical analysis and forecasting for comprehensive data
analysis. Improved sales and financial performance is a major objective of a global sourcing strategy.
The research is trying to present the way of transforming existing data, gathered from different data
sources in powerful managerial information, integrating “business intelligence” solutions in Romanian’s
companies, with the help of some famous companies which create BI products.
Keywords: Business Intelligence, business performance management, decision support systems.
Introduction
Today, the time available for making operative decisions in a business environment is decreasing:
decisions must be made within days or even hours. Just two decades, similar decisions still took weeks or
months (Tiemeyer, 1995).
The process of decision making, regardless of the size of the company, is a rather complex one, implying
data processing, information and knowledge. Usually, the data inputted in the IT systems of the company
are very numerous, sometimes heterogeneous or provided from heterogeneous sources, are widespread into
the system, and their transforming in information which can be analyzed for taking decisions is, in most
cases, a lengthy and difficult process. The data warehouse (DW) and business intelligence (BI) systems, as
well as the Decisions Support Systems (DSS) are designed to help the companies to answer in real time to
complex questions. There are more different techniques in this respect, and the choice of the right
instrument leads to finding the relevant answers for a certain company. The process is a dynamic one, and
these answers are changing along with the business strategy of the respective company.
Many organizations do not have well-developed global sourcing measurement strategies in place, and
thereby lose out on attractive business opportunities. Realizing these opportunities requires a detailed
understanding of global sourcing performance, which can be facilitated through Business Intelligence (BI)
concepts applied in other areas of supply chain management.
The present article is structured in two parts, which include:
• a presentation about the significance of business intelligence (BI), why is so important to have a
business intelligence solution in your company, what can we do with a BI solution and which are the
types of problems that BI can resolve;
• the second part describes some BI solutions used in these days in Romanian companies.
1. Business Intelligent – overview and importance
It is difficult to give an exact definition to a complex solution which can vary depending on the analyzed
context. In an abstract way, it can be said that BI is the process of „combining” the information from
several sources, and presenting the result in a form which can be used in taking the business decisions. This
aspect is more obvious if we are going to analyze the iterative character of the business intelligence
processes, where the steps of analysis, planning and improvement need the harmonious join of the
information from the data base offered by the business intelligence with the right managerial decisions
taken on the basis of all this information.
1298
„Understanding the business or the intelligence of the business”, the translation mot-à-mot of the Business
Intelligence expression is obtained precisely though the analysis and refining of the data regarding the
operations of a company. It is a process which results from the data collected at the company level from
various internal activities (marketing, sales, production) and/or external (customer behavior or competition
behavior as a reaction to the internal activities). This collection is iterative and cyclical and this is why the
collected data should be organized to facilitate their transformation in information (reports, queries,
analyses or presentations). The final purpose of these processes is a set of decisions which affect the
functioning and the productivity of any business, and the solutions which sustain this process are extremely
important and have decisive effects, but they cannot guarantee the effect if a lot of elements
(organizational, technical, procedural) are not properly set up.
BI applications include the activities of decision support, query and reporting, online analytical processing
(OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining” (Sauder School of Business, 2000).
A business intelligence solution brings information to the hand of the users that need it: analysts and
experts (multidimensional analysis, statistics), consumers (dynamic queries and simple analysis) and
information users (reports). (Microsoft, 2004)
According to a study published by Data Warehousing Institute in 2000, (Data Warehousing Institute,
2000), named: “Harnessing Customer Information for Strategic Advantage: Technical Challenges and
Business Solutions” the technologies DATA WAREHOUSE and BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE allow the
companies to collect, to integrate and to analyze the information related to customers so that this will
enable the companies to understand the intentions and the behavior of the customers. Being aware of these
information and knowledge flows, the companies can optimize the interaction with the customers at all
levels, which will lead directly to the increase of revenues and profit.
BI applications allow the ability for aggregate and summaries on specific and detailed categories at the
same time. As part of the analysis of different processes, these kinds of applications show exact
information and expel moreover elements. Thus, the managerial team can monitor the business
performance variables. As an example of the various categories of variables, which we can see in the table
below, we can mention: the value or the volume of sales on a specific region (area), on product, on spell or
the rate of products return for different reasons, the rate of discard from the guarantee period, the analysis
of the customers behavior in a specific situation or in a predefined context.
Type of BI
application
Activities that can take place / Questions that can be answered
Product
analysis
• Which is the product which has the highest profit margin or the highest contribution
to the absolute value of the profit?
• Which are the products which bring the lowest profit margin (unprofitable products)?
Marketing
analysis
Demographical analysis using information about customers and sales data, price
sensitivity (elasticity of demand), consuming preferences. For example: • Which are the
products preferred by consumers belonging to the market segment with a monthly
income lower than a certain level?
Using this information we can estimate the efficiency of the publicity campaigns and of
the marketing activity.
Sales
analysis
Identifying trends, season analysis, and association of complementary products (buying
a package of products).
• Which is the sales tendency (trend) in the stores from a specific demographical area?
• Which are the products with growing sales and which are the customers that buy
products like these?
1299
Retail
analysis
Data analysis regarding retail orders, supplies analysis, stocks analysis.
Through these analysis it will be possible to estimate stocks better, to schedule
deliveries better, to make proposals for the price promotions for certain products and
for the delivery calendar.
Financial
analysis
The analysis of the profitability on departments, category of products, geographical
locations, seasonality. A particular case is represented by financial institutions (banks,
assurance companies) where the financial analysis plays a key part in carrying on the
activity: defining bank’s packages of products and services, scoring analysis as a
method of synthesizing of information about the financial situation of a certain
customer, in an aggregate criteria of evaluation as rating or score type on the basis of
which it is possible to obtain a credit facility
Budget
planning
The increase of the efficiency of a manufacture process by costs reduction, increasing
the production, planning the next fiscal year (forecasting the balance sheet of incomes
and expenses, cash-flow statement, etc)
Balanced
scorecard
Defining performance indicators from a specific area, calculated from the existing
information from the system. We can follow the entire performance of the company or
the performance of some groups as against others from the same area.
Project
management
analysis
The analysis of the resources way of allocation, analysis of projects portfolio.
Table 1 - Activities and questions in terms of BI application’s types
2. Business Intelligence solutions
Once we have distinguished the importance and benefits of BI, we can move on to present and point out
the features and attributes of specific BI solutions. In this way, we can say that in Romania the continuous
increasing of the competition between market sectors makes a must to adopt BI solutions adequate to the
business specificity. The companies are interested in finding out which are the best products on the market,
the most profitable customer and which are the new products they need to be more profitable. Alongside
competitively, as a generic element, to adopting BI solutions contributes also the necessity to optimize
processes and to take better decisions, the bigger volume of data accumulated in operational systems and
the European and international standards addressed to different industries.
We are going over some BI solutions presented also in Romania and trying to point out their strengths in
the area:
a) Microsoft is one of the companies which offer integrated, powerful and comprehensive solutions
of business intelligence which allow performing data mining analysis, reporting solutions with the
support of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Here
we talk about Microsoft SQL Server 2005, fated by his technical resources to provide new and
comprehensive possibilities of exploring data in order to offer companies an effectively
competitive advantage, to help taking decisions that will make it in direct advantage.
The solutions of business intelligence are conceived to include multiple data sources, from a large area of
operations, easy to integrate with the support of Integration Services ready to explore and improve data,
getting an integrating vision of all analyzed data and building extended business analysis as OLAP (On
Line Analytical Processing), data warehouse, data mining (finding patterns and applying them over the
business operations, using a flexible and accessible platform), tools for data extract, transform, and load
using multiple and different data sources (ETL tools), balanced scorecard, etc, with the support of Analysis
Services.
The SQL Server 2005 BI Workbench suite is made of five basic tools (Monaco, 2004):
• SQL Server Relational Database – used to create relational database;
• Analysis Services – used to create multidimensional model (measures, dimensions and schema);
1300
• Data Transformation Services (DTS) – used to extract, transform and load data from sources to the
data warehouse or schema;
• Reporting Services – used to build and manage enterprise reporting using the relational or
multidimensional sources;
• Data Mining – used to extract information based on predetermined algorithms.
Figure 1 - Analysis Services Architecture: relationships between different technologies levels involved in
Analysis Services (Source: processed after Monaco, 2004)
b) Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is the only BI product to deliver the complete range of BI
capabilities needed for corporate performance management: scorecarding, reporting, analysis,
dashboards, and business event management as well as data integration, on a single, service-
oriented architecture (SOA). Author, share, and use reports that draw on data across all enterprise
sources for better business decisions. (Cognos Corporation)
Complete BI capabilities in one product, BI platform contains: accessing quality data, system
administration and management, architecture and software environment. Both for the business and for IT
users the product includes a framework manager, an administration console and a good integration with
Microsoft Excel (Cognos Corporation).
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence has a lot of customers, over 23,000 and we can mention among other IBM,
Tyson Foods, Inc., BearingPoint, etc.
c) BISS – Business Intelligence Software Solutions, part of RomSys group offers a complete suite
of tools, named Business Objects Portal: Crystal reports, Web intelligence and OLAP intelligence.
Among BI platform products we can distinguish: BusinessObjects Enterprise, BI platform, Crystal
Report Explorer, BusinessObjects Auditor, etc.
Can
include
distinct
fields
and/or
data
marts
MS
SQL
Server
Oracle
Text
files
Operational
Data
Data
Warehouse
Star
Schema
OLAP
Cube
Browsers for
OLAP Cubes
Evaluation
Software
ProClarity,
Excel Pivot
Table, Web
components
from Office
ETL
DT
S
Analysis Services Architecture
1301
BI platform has a set of services for distributing and administrating business intelligence facilities. Users
facilities include access to business intelligence portal, ways of interacting with the shown content and the
administrating facilities must include security components, data access and audit.
The products and services of BusinessObjects Enterprise Information Manager allow the integration and
the improving of performances. Corporate performance management (CPM) is the area of business
intelligence involved with monitoring and managing an organization's performance, according to key
performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, return on investment (ROI), overhead, and operational
costs. For online businesses, CPM includes additional factors such as page views, server load, network
traffic and transactions per second. CPM is also known as business performance management (BPM) or
enterprise performance management (EPM).
Figure 2 - Performance management from Business Objects Platform
(Source:http://www.businessobjects.ro)
Each of the IT solutions presented above has its advantages, records an impressive number of customers
and is continuously developing from 1 day to another, through the addition of new packages of analyse and
reporting which to guide the persons in charge in order to take the best decision at the proper moment.
3. Conclusions
A Business Intelligence platform large enough to comprise and integrate all data, to analyze them and
report them in customized way can help any company to move from the desire to obtain performance to
action through better and faster decisions.
More and more business solutions are emerging and their efficiency is increasing, as they try to answer to a
larger number of questions about the performance of the companies. No matter what solution you may
choose, the business intelligent system must help the top management to make better, more informed
business decisions, to increase their competitive edge and to respond more quickly evolving customer
needs. Many advantages can rise from a BI solution wise chosen, so that the management will be able to
answer in real time to complex questions, to maximize profit and to take appropriate decisions based on all
relevant information and will also allow it to monitor the impact of its decisions with timely correction and
adjustments.
References
1. The Data Warehousing Institute (2000) Releases Comprehensive Industry Study on Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) - SEATTLE, Washington, available on-line athttp://www.tdwi.org/display.aspx?id=5140
2. Microsoft (2004) Solu?ia Microsoft pentru Business Intelligence, available on-line athttp://www.microsoft.com/Romania/Solutii/BI.mspx
1302
3. Monaco, G. T. (2004) An Introduction to OLAP in SQL Server 2005, available on-line athttp://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/21410
4. Murray, Janet Y., Kotabe, Masaaki and Wildt, Albert R. (1995) Strategic and financial
performance implications of global sourcing strategy: a contingency analysis, Journal of
International Business Studies, Vol. 26.
5. Sauder School of Business (2000) Glossary of Common IT Terms, available on-line at
www.sauder.ubc.ca/cgs/itm/itm_glossary.html
6. Tiemeyer, E. and Zsifkovitis, H.E. (1995) Information als Führungsmittel: Executive Information
Systems, Konzeption, Technologie, Produkte, Einführung, 1st edition, Munich, p. 95.
7. Vasile, Gabriel (2007), Creúterea competi?iei impune solu?ii de Business Intelligence, Revista
Market Watch, available on-line athttp://www.marketwatch.ro
8.http://www.businessobjects.ro
9.http://www.cognos.com – Cognos Corporation
10.http://www.microsoft.com
11.http://www.proclarity.com
doc_465621071.pdf