Abdoulaye Mouke Yansane: Truly the best (BI) Business Intelligence tool...

1. 12 Faces of BI
Twelve things you need to know about
data to succeed in business today.

2. Birst makes even the most challenging enterprise data easy to visualize. Now all
users—including business analysts, managers and data experts—can view their
data in ways that make the most sense to them. This e-book showcases how, in the
new era of BI, analytics can be used by more people, in more functions, with more
significant results. So now everyone can think fast.
The new era of Business intelligence
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
© Copyright 2014 Birst, Inc. All rights reserved.

3. VP of Channel Marketing at a Major Electronic Retailer
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Understanding sales across different channels and regions to identify top performers and
improve low performing channels.
Insight: Mango Online Stores dominate most of the sales in the West. However, sales for all other
regions mostly come from Mango Retail Stores.
Decision: Increase marketing investments and improve the user experience of online shoppers for the rest of
the country using best practices learned from the West. Investigate poor retail store performance in the West.
Visualization: Multi-Color Bubble Chart, Trellis Chart.
1

4. Senior Analyst of Claims Processing Management at a Top Pharmaceutical Company
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Understanding Physician Groups, Drug Classes and Diagnoses that contribute to high cost claims and
their changes over time.
Insight: Cost of 2nd Generation Antidepressants and HMG-COA Reductase Inhibitors has been falling. Frontage
Street Physicians submit considerably higher cost claims than their peer providers, and the number of claims and
cost of claims for Nortrel is the highest compared to any other drug.
Decision: Consider offering a generic substitute for Nortrel to lower the cost of this popular drug. Investigate the
Frontage Street Physicians group by understanding their average cost per claim and identify repetitive patterns in
the types of claims that are associated with high costs.
Visualization: Bar Chart, Spark Line Report, KPI Displays, Multi-Color Bubble Chart.
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5. CEO of a Large Business Supply Retailer
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Understanding where to focus new investments based on profit and revenue
performance across different products and markets.
Insight: The West, followed by the Prairie, shows the biggest gap between sales and profit.
Technology products are taking off nicely in the Prairie, but are declining in the West.
Decision: Continue investing in Technology sales in the Prairie region, but reduce that investment
in the West. In addition, reduce discounting in the Prairie and West to match the Atlantic.
Visualization: Spline over Compound Column Chart, Trellis Chart.
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6. Manager of Call Center at a Global eCommerce Company
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Improving performance of call centers across all regions and handling more calls
in less time.
Insight: EMEA’s call centers have the lowest abandonment rates and hold times. North
American call centers have by far the biggest volume of calls; yet even when their hold
times are close to zero, the abandonment rates are pretty high.
Decision: Given that EMEA has low hold times and abandonment rates, apply some best
practices from EMEA to the North American call centers, and then to the APAC call centers.
Visualization: Multi-Color Scatter Chart, Column and Line Charts, On-Dashboard Interactive Filtering.
4

7. CMO of Healthcare Software Company
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Understanding Lead-to-Cash activities across multiple systems to remove bottlenecks
and reduce overall cycle time to acquire cash.
Insight: There is an $8 million gap between projected and target bookings. While sales reps are
doing a good job converting leads to opportunities, marketing is not successfully converting contacts
to leads as they have in the past. Also, the booking-to-cash ratio is not at 100% of its target.
Decision: Leverage previous high-performing campaigns and re-target them to generate more leads
and improve conversion rates. Use this executive dashboard to work with the company’s controller to
ensure accounts pay on time.
Visualization: Dashboards, Bullet Chart, KPI Displays, Micro-Trend Charts, Line Over Column Chart, Funnel Chart, Embedded Images.
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8. CFO of a SaaS Business
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Determining where to invest in sales and marketing to drive growth. Leverage key SaaS indicators to ensure
new annual revenue exceeds the cost to acquire new customers (Magic Number > 1).
Insight: All key indicators are positively showing healthy recurring revenue and low customer acquisition rates.
The only region of concern is the Southwest, with a less than optimal magic number (at 0.7).
Decision: While the magic number is growing across the board for all products and segments, further investigation in the
Southwest is needed before increasing investments in sales and marketing to grow the business in that region.
Visualization: KPI Displays & Micro Charts, Geo Maps, Line Over Stacked Column Combination Chart.
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9. A Frequent Flyer VP of Sales at a Mid-Size High-Tech Company
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Staying up to the minute on sales pipeline analysis and understanding detail changes in pipeline, forecast and closed deals.
Insight: There is a $600K gap in revenue for the current quarter. The Southwest is furthest away from meeting its targets and its pipeline is
trending down. There is also an unusually high number of opportunities that have moved out of the pipeline for this quarter.
Decision: Investigate why deals are moving out of the current pipeline and determine the root cause for poor sales performance in the
Southwest. Drive to the target number with a strong pipeline and performance across all regions.
Visualization: Bullet Chart,Waterfall Chart, Display Filter Buttons, Spark Lines, KPI Displays—on an iPad.
7

10. Product Line Manager at a Major Office Supply Retailer
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Market Segmentation: identifying product, price and sales combinations in different
market segments to optimize the product mix.
Insight: Corporate accounts are the biggest buyers across all products, while Consumer and
Small Business markets are the weakest segments. Within the Consumer accounts, Technology
Sales is declining and the gap between Revenue and Quantity in Office Supplies is closing most
rapidly—indicating high discounts.
Decision: Investigate better pricing and packaging options for the Office Supply product line
within the Consumer sector. Work with sales leadership to turn around Technology Sales
in that market as well.
Visualization: Dual Axis Line Chart,Trellis Chart.
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11. Analyst at a Large Charitable NonProfit Organization
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Identifying areas where the impact of natural disasters has the biggest financial
cost for homeowners.
Insight: The blue dots represent the areas with the highest percentage of damage per
dollar value of real estate. The spatial chart shows the dollar impact per dollar of real estate
value for a specific five square mile area represented by the blue dots.
Decision: Identify targeted areas for deploying the most resources, materials and first aid
to ensure fast response and recovery.
Visualization: Ad Hoc Analysis, Scatter Plot Overlay on Geo Maps, Embedded External Visualization.
9

12. Head of Supply Chain Operations at a National Specialty Food Producer
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Finding more cost effective ways to meet shipment demand given region and
shipping methods. Identifying regions with the most shipments and highest shipping costs.
Insight: Express Air has been the least expensive shipping method year over year. However,
high quantity orders to the West, Prairie and Ontario regions use Regular Air shipments.
Decision: Reduce costs by switching to Express Air for shipments to the West and Ontario.
Compensate for the lack of Express Air in the Prairie region by working with more local suppliers.
Visualization: Multi-Color and Multi-Shaped Scatter Plot,Trellis Chart.
10

13. Financial Advisor at a Global Wealth Management Company
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Analyzing current book of business and understanding opportunities for growth.
Insight: Indication of a large business is measured by number of clients (Households) and Assets
Under Management (AUM). However, compared to Peers and Top Peers, this advisor generates
significantly less revenue per household ($939 compared to $1,369 and $1,516).
Decision: Find clients with opportunity to expand product and service offerings. Leverage knowledge
of how peer price to get the most value from significant relationships. Focus on a “move up or move out”
strategy for clients with low AUM to provide better service for larger customers.
Visualization: Pixel-Perfect Reports,Tables, Stacked Bar 100% Charts, Line Chart.
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14. Director Southwest Sales at a Major Networking Equipment Manufacturer
12 Faces of Business Intelligence
Challenge: Understand sales performance and opportunity execution by region and sales rep.
Insight: Southwest region has no coverage in New Mexico. Pipeline is very thin at top and
only one rep is working on more than a single opportunity, indicating a shortage of leads.
Decision: Hire a new rep in New Mexico. Work with marketing to generate more demand
for the rest of the reps in the territory.
Visualization: Stacked Bar, Overlay of Scatter Plot on Color-Coded Geo Map, Embedded Report, Funnel Chart, Interactive Filtering.
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15. Business Intelligence hasn’t always been for everyone. Over the years it was
frequently the domain of a handful of analysts and power users who created reports
and dashboards for consumers.But now data has been democratized.A new era of BI
is emerging where there is an analytic tool for every individual—people, not power
users, can tailor their data to provide the insights that matter most to them.We have
profiled just a few faces of BI’s new era. To find out how you can use BI to mine gold
from your data, visit www.birst.com.
Closing thoughts
12 Faces of Business Intelligence

16. Birst is the only enterprise-caliber Business Intelligence platform born in the cloud.
Less costly and more agile than Legacy BI and more powerful than Data Discovery,
Birst is engineered with an automated data warehouse and rich, visual analytics, to
give meaning to data—all types and sizes. Coupled with the agility of the Cloud, Birst
gives business teams the ability to solve real problems. Fast. Find out why Gartner
named Birst a Challenger in its most recent BI Magic Quadrant and why more than a
thousand businesses rely on Birst for their analytic needs.
Learn to think fast at www.birst.com or email us info@birst.com.
You can always feel free to give us a call at (866) 940-1496 (North America)
or +1-415-766-4800 (International). Follow us on Twitter @birstbi.
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12 Faces of Business Intelligence