How Business Intelligence Systems Make Executive Dashboards, KPI Alerts and Analysis a Reality Across Your Enterprise’s Systems
As companies grow in size and complexity, providing actionable, analytical information to senior management has become increasingly difficult. No one system provides more than 10% of the data senior management needs. Key data such as plans and history often exist in spreadsheets outside the information systems. Systems such as the telephone phone switches (ACD) have valuable productivity and service data, but management usually doesn’t have access to it. Reports from commercial systems by software companies often leave the user wanting a lot more.
Multichannel companies not only have multiple channels for dealing with customers; by their very nature, these companies often have multiple systems, with numerous—and differing—occurrences of key data and metrics. Depending on the database design and the age of the information systems, there may even be multiple occurrences of key data within a single system. This problem is actually worse in companies with large scale multichannel “systems”—because in reality, these are multiple individual applications. Many companies have grown up selecting best-of-breed systems, and since no one vendor in the marketplace today can provide more than two of the best-of-breed systems needed, these have disparate databases and designs. With separate systems for order management, fulfillment, call center ACD switches, marketing, product information, inventory, finance and e-commerce, we have created silos of information across the enterprise. ERP system proponents may say, “this is what we have been trying to tell you for years,” but the reality is that most ERP systems available to the direct marketplace don’t provide specialized direct, retail or warehouse management functions that are as good as best-of-breed.
In moderate to large companies the multichannel transaction systems consist of a significant number of information systems and databases. Here are some typical examples:
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