My next piece of advice to every company is make full use of any Business Intelligence that is available to you. 

 

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

 

BI is skills, technologies, information, and data about your business and its environment.  Business Intelligence aims to help business owners and managers make better decisions and is often referred to as a Decision Support System (DSS).

 

 

 

At the high end, there are OLAP cubes, data mining, predictive analysis, and benchmarking.  OLAP cubes are really beyond the scope of this article, and mostly they're useful in big company situations.

 

However, data mining is very important to nearly every business.  Data mining is an attempt to extract information or patterns from a large set of data.  Nearly every business develops a large amount of data.  Even a very small entrepreneur has a checkbook that could be data mined to see trends and patterns.

 

Predictive analysis is a an attempt to use historical data to predict future events.  For instance we might look at our annual sales for the past three years and then try to predict what our sales will be next year.  Every business should be doing some sort of predictive analysis, especially in this economy.

 

Benchmarking is a process of measuring performance against a known standard.  Sometimes we try to measure ourselves against the best businesses in our industry.  Sometimes we measure ourselves against an industry average. 

 

Benchmarking can be useful at all levels of a corporation.  I've used it in manufacturing plants to measure against a known standard.  I've even used it to compare individuals to Best Practices as a way to see how their performance compares.  Every business should be doing some sort of benchmarking to improve profits.

 

 

 

 

Your accounting system should be the first place that you look for insights into your business and Business Intelligence.  Most accounting systems provide information beyond just your standard P&L.  For instance, your A/R collections and inventory turn are statistics that most accounting systems now offer.

 

Also, your accounting system likely includes some sort of report writer.  Crystal Reports was the de facto standard for more than a decade, but SQL reporting services is catching up quickly.  As you start to look for information about your business, the report writer in your accounting system is a great place to look.

 

 

No matter what other tools you use for business intelligence, it's very likely that sooner or later your data will end up in Excel.  With it's ability to calculate, graph, and report on data, you can't beat the power of Excel for Business Intelligence.  Excel has the added benefit of being able to mine data from all sorts of sources and import it into a workbook where you can sort, group, and analyze the data.

 

 

If you have an accounting system, it's likely that your data resides in SQL Server.  SQL Server is a powerful relational database that is scalable.  If your data is in SQL Server, the things you can do with your data are almost limitless.

 

With SQL Server and SQL Reporting services, you can query data in almost any way you can imagine.  Do you want to know how many sales you had in Phoenix in 1998?  No problem, a quick query can pull out that information in lightening speed.  Want to create a report showing your sales by state during 2006?  All you need to do is use SQL reporting services and you can have that information. 

 

One of the best things about SQL Reporting Services is that once you've created a report, you can run it with a few clicks of the mouse over and over again.  And since your queries are

parameterized, you can easily change the parameters of your queries to get different information.  For instance you can take your sales by state report and print a 2005 report.  Then change 20045 to 2006 and you'll immediately get the 2006 data.  SQL Reporting Services is quick, easy to use, and powerful.

 

Create a Suite of Business Intellegence Reports

In this day and age, every business owner must have a suite of BI Reports that he looks at on a regular basis.  Things are so competitive these days, that you'll need information in order to survive.

No matter what sort of business you're in, I would love to talk to you about improving your BI Reports.  These days with the internet and remote access products, I no longer need to come to your office to help you design the reports that will make you a success.  We can do it all over the internet which will give you affordable access to my expertiese. 

I would like to talk to you about your reporting needs.  Feel free to e-mail me at John@ControllersAdvice.Com or call me at 253-846-2804.

John Wheeler