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In a competitive environment, you need your company’s business systems to deliver information fast.
You want to know what has happened, what is happening, what will happen, and you want to be able to find out why. You want up-to-date performance metrics, financial ratios, profit and loss summaries, and other types of information that roll up across all departments, products, and geographies. And you want the information to be based on the business you did around the world today - not last quarter or last month or even last week.
You need Daily Business Intelligence, which lets managers get continuous, current information about their business and use this information to make better decisions and move rapidly in response to changes. And you need all of this data available in an executive dashboard – a daily online “newspaper” for your business.
In challenging economic times, companies must make decisions quickly based on timely analysis of accurate data. Until now, it has been impossible for organisations to provide management with a complete summary of business activities every day. They may have spent millions of dollars on application software, only to find that they are still not able to collect, let alone effectively distribute. The information that is critical to keeping a business running. That is because each company division or international unit clings to outdated, customised business processes. Worse still, they adopt best-of-breed applications that automate only bits and pieces of their processes, and so marketing remains disconnected from sales, sales remains disconnected from finance, and so on. In such a scenario, distributed systems trap information inside silos, making it nearly impossible to collaborate and access information across business units and geographies – particularly in real time.
An integrated suite of software applications is the answer for businesses that need better information. A bunch of applications that run on multiple data sources, or that do not address key portions of business flows, are not a true suite. But how do you know when a suite is really a suite, or if it is a “faux suite” – a collection of disparate systems and customer models patched together and sold by a vendor claiming to have a suite?
Fragmented Information
The first problem faux suites present is fragmented information, created by different, disconnected systems in marketing, sales, service, and other organisations, and different systems in geographic locations. All the silos of information need to be consolidated to reveal an accurate picture of business events. Until now, consolidating information meant building a data warehouse. But that is not the best way to provide real-time data on critical business metrics.
Incomplete Automation
The second problem faux suites create is incomplete automation, caused by using software packages that automate only part of a business process. Specialised systems, such as those that come from best-of-breed vendors, do not cover entire business flows, such as point of sale through delivery. The result? Disconnected systems that may leave businesses with analytic capabilities at only a departmental level, not across an entire business process, nor the entire enterprise. In either scenario, it is impossible to get a complete snapshot of the business in real time. Decision makers do not have information, they have pieces of a puzzle, leaving them unable to answer simple questions about their businesses, such as “How many quotes turn into orders?” or “How many contracts are outstanding?” A true suite of applications is designed from the start to work together. The applications share the same model for information and automate business processes across an enterprise so that every organisation is up to date, all the time.
The solution is a complete suite that automates key business flows like Campaign-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay. This provides for Daily Business Intelligence, in which information is continuously summarised and displayed in personalised portals, viewable by line of business, geography, department or product. And when the business intelligence system and the data sit in the same system, the information is current – customers aren’t waiting for data to pass through a separate data aggregation and analysis system.
Nigel Murphy
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