Business Intelligence basics emphasizing the advantages and requirements for SME's of adopting the appropriate BI tool(s) and the rationale for doing so.

1. Getting Actionable Insights –
with Business Intelligence
Eric Anderson, MBA CMC
eanderson@smartpoint.ca
250-882-6543

2. Business Intelligence
• BI / Analytics tools help to integrate existing,
disparate, "stovepiped" data already being
captured by your company
• BI Tools produce more comprehensive and
meaningful reporting and analytics – ie.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHT
• These insights support your effort to increase
productivity by providing:
– decision support
– performance benchmarking, and
– outcomes measurement

3. If you are using any of...
• ...then acquiring and implementing the
appropriate BI tools will provide you with the
ability to merge the information being
captured here
– into usable and meaningful cross-functional
performance information

4. Adding “BI” gives value-add to existing
systems
• ...and ultimately helps to identify nonconformances,
points of wastage, supply chain and process
inefficiencies, and thus...
• ...the critical issues underlying productivity that must
be addressed.

5. BI for an SME
• Reliance on tools like spreadsheets have the
following dangers:
– They don’t scale very well (and introduce risk)
– They don’t provide actionable insights
– They typically only report on particular transaction
types
– They ignore other factors that might affect how
the underlying data should be interpreted

6. Explore BI as one possible “DT” option
• Elicit high-level requirements
• Qualify the "DT" Options
• No “leaping to a solution”
• Arrive at an appropriate solution that
supports:
– Operational effectiveness
– Continuous improvement - costs, quality, and time
– Cost focus vs. flow focus

7. Cost focus vs. flow focus
• Determine where / how the company is
currently:
– generating, storing, using raw data
• How Intelligence can be used to reduce wastage /
exceptions
• Methodologies, processes, architectures, and
range of solutions
• ...that can transform your firm's raw data into
meaningful information that better supports
management's decision-making

8. Other Key Areas of Focus in BI
• Other processes and technologies such as:
• Data integration
• Data quality
• Data warehousing
...this is all about understanding and measuring
your CSF’s, which leads to...
• data preparation and data usage – going into
the actual presentation layer of reporting,
analytics, dashboards, etc.

9. Barriers to Adopting BI
• Tight budgets
• Lack of organizational / institutional
knowledge
• Fewer resources, all of whom are maxed on
other projects
– less time to spend on BI planning

10. But – the Potential Benefits
• Aggregated data from different sources
• Analysis and insight from that data –
automatically and configurable
• Improved decision-making – particularly
around process flows and inefficiencies
• Risk mitigation benefits
• Ultimately – your firm competes more
effectively in marketplace

11. Four Critical Areas
• Information / Data Sources
– Harness data from spreadsheets, financials, contact mgr lists,
payroll systems, asset / inventory / warehouse / production
management systems, any other data sources
• Technology
– Aggressively-priced alternatives have brought comprehensive BI
technology within reach. Some tools available online, on the
Cloud
• Intelligence “rules”
– Determine what needs to be measured, and how to measure it
• Implementation and Communication
– How to use and get intended meaning from the “I” in “BI”

12. SME Manufacturing Case
• Isolated data stored for NC cutting equipment contains
valuable “tag” information (bar-coded lot number,
dates, customer info. etc.)
• Combine this with cutting performance /
configurations (by customer)
• Export, transform, and load information to BI layer, and
then to dashboard, gives:
– Easily distributable, usable information on product
customization, supply chain characteristics
– Keys to process flow improvements
• Same principles can be applied to (say) POS data in
retail setting

13. SME Manufacturing Case 2
• Company gained a much clearer understanding of
which products for which customers were costing
more to produce (and why);
• By taking action on this information, processes
were streamlined, and bottlenecks were reduced
/ eliminated (without moving them somewhere
else).
• Better tracking of work-in-progress, upstream
supply, implemented “kanban” delivery.
• Required new attention to B2B / e-commerce
capabilities

14. • On to Rob Cooper and e-commerce
• Thanks!