Executive Support Systems (ESS) provide executives with organized data and reports from across an organization to help with business decision making. ESS consolidate information from different departments into summarized reports and some also provide predictive analysis. This allows executives to make proactive decisions rather than reacting to issues. Features of ESS include being able to access detailed data with drill-downs, compare trends over time, and detect problems or opportunities early. ESS help executives make better informed decisions more quickly than manually compiling data from various sources.

1. Executive Support System [ESS]
Unit 2, from the chapter
“ Kinds of information Systems”
BY,
ROMEO. B
First Year, First Semester , “MBA” ‘B’ Section
SJBIT, Bangalore.

2. Traditional View of Systems

3. ESS

4. Flow of Information in Organization

5. Scenario
How do you make business
decisions?
If you’re like most executives, then
you probably have one of those
enormous Excel spreadsheets, a
dozen tabs wide, with data from
various departments.

6. • It is painstaking to build and update a spreadsheet with figures
from every department of your organization.
• The data always needs to fit together nicely and there is a high
risk for human error.
• Even if all the numbers are keyed in correctly, when analyzing
the data, the sharpest CEO will often miss a reoccurring pattern
or red flag amongst their KPIs.
• The opportunity costs of this kind of manual process are also
staggering.
• Crunching numbers in spreadsheets leaves executives, or the
staff developing these reports, with very little time and energy to
then analyze that data and create forecasts that positively
influence business decisions.

7. What is ESS/EIS ?
Executive Support System (ESS) is a reporting tool (software) that allows
you to turn your organization's data into useful summarized reports.
These reports are generally used by executive level managers for quick
access to reports coming from all company levels and departments such as
billing, cost accounting , staffing, scheduling, and more.
In addition to providing quick access to organized data from departments,
some Executive Support System tools also provide analysis tools that
predicts a series of performance outcomes over time using the input data.
This type of ESS is useful to executives as it provides possible outcomes
and quick reference to statistics and numbers needed for decision-making.

8. Architecture of ESS

9. What Happens without ESS/EIS ?
What Happens when use of ESS/EIS ?

10. Without ESS: A Re-Active Business Decision
 A CEO receives a call from an online advertising company offering an incredible
rate on pay-per-click ads, but for a limited time.
 Now it’s up to the CEO to quickly figure out which products will yield the most
return on the advertising investment.
 First the executive logs into an online advertising dashboard to compare costs,
response rates and return from previous campaigns.
 Then he gets on the phone with a warehouse account manager, or logs into an
inventory management database.
 From the warehouse, he finds out the cost to ship each product, the list price of
each product and which products have been sitting on the shelves the longest or
accruing the most storage fees.
 With all of this data and information in place, the executive can figure out which
product will likely yield the highest return and finally respond to the advertising
offer before the deadline expires.

11. With ESS: A Pro-Active Business Decision
Now let’s work backwards from that example, but with an ESS in place.
 The ESS sends an alert to the company CEO that product “X” was stored for “X” number
of days, or that the warehouse storage costs for product “X” have exceeded a certain
total dollar amount.
 Working from that report, the executive alerts his sales and marketing employees to
research the most cost-effective ways to move product “X” off the shelves.
 Here the CEO is not scrambling to reply to an outside call from an advertising company.
 The ESS alert put him in the driver’s seat and gave the sales and marketing team lead
time to find the best

12. Features of ESS
 Contemporary ESS bring together data from all parts of the firm and enable
managers to select, access, and tailor them as needed using easy-to-use
desktop analytical tools and online data displays.
 Through their ESS, many managers have access to public data, such as
news services, financial market databases, and economic information.
 ESS has the ability to drill down, moving from a piece of summary data to
lower and lower levels of detail.
 Well-designed ESS also have some facility for environmental scanning.
 A key information requirement of managers at the strategic level is the ability
to detect signals of problems in the organizational environment that indicate
strategic threats and opportunities.
 Ability to analyze, compares, and highlight trends.

13.  The easy use of graphics enables the user to look at more data in
less time with greater clarity and insight than paper-based systems
provide.
 Problems are handled before they become too damaging;
opportunities are also identified earlier.
 Immediate access to so much data also enables executives to better
monitor activities of lower units reporting to them.
 That very monitoring ability enables decision making to be
decentralized and to take place at lower operating levels.

14. Summary
Executive Support Systems meet the needs of
corporate executives by providing them with vast
amounts of Information quickly and in graphical
form to help them make effective decisions.
ESS must be flexible, easy to use, and contain both
internal and external sources of information.