Business intelligence is no longer about pushing out reports and long, drawn-out consulting engagements. IT needs to transition its thinking towards business insight on-demand that delivers value fast. Stuart Barnard believes there’s a significant shift towards self-serve business analysis using enterprise applications that are as simple to use and develop as those we consume every day in our personal lives.
In times of an economic tightening of belts, historically business intelligence (BI) expenditure remains intact because it can help organisations with governance, cost and profitability analysis, as companies figure out what to cut and how to do it safely for their greatest benefit. Despite the obvious need for BI, BI vendors now more than ever need to step up, as organisations are demanding BI to deliver faster time to market, higher ROI and better adoptability.
We’re now seeing a new breed of ‘emerging technologies’, as defined by Gartner, like self-serve BI, aimed at non-technical users, which is characterised by low pricing models, very short implementation times (hours or days), minimal training and in-memory processing. In these ‘self-service’ BI environments the focus is on business analysis (not reporting), where the act of deriving knowledge from data becomes literally contagious because users get instant gratification and tell their peers. Speed and simplicity have created the impetus for a genuine revolution in people’s ability to view and analyse massive data sets.
The consumerisation of enterprise software is rapidly underway and the role of the IT department is changing from provider to mentor and facilitator. It’s the users of the software who are now driving the success of BI software deployments because they determine if and how a product will be used, tailored to a specific process. Business people are demanding that the software they use in their work environment should be as clear, simple and engaging as the applications they use in their personal lives. No longer happy with a six-month to a year delivery time to receive value from their BI investments, they want instant gratification, or six days, in the case of Toro Australia.
Toro Australia, part of the international Toro Group, manufacturer of beautification products for residential, recreational and commercial landscapes, has long pioneered a lean approach to growth. This now includes its DIY BI strategy that improves customer and product profitability by developing processes and business support systems that ensure company resources are directed at the right level to improve customer and product profitability. This had to be achieved in an environment where Toro’s ERP system and data outputs are managed overseas from head office.
Using QlikView BI, Toro can now freely explore and analyse sales and margin impacts of in excess of 5000 individual products from every conceivable angle of the business. This includes margin rates per customer, sales per quarter by salesperson, sales per product code by district and salesperson. Its operational teams can also better manage freight costs, analysing freight against sales at a customer level.
QlikView is even used to monitor the resources an individual customer uses in the business and the amount of time a territory manager spends face to face with a customer compared to the value that customer delivers to ensure an equitable balance.
Toro extracted five years of data from one of its business units and, with only one internal resource and support on hand from Inside Info, it built a powerful profitability analysis application that was back on the desks of business managers in six days. The result was an integrated view of customer profitability at a material level.
Speed and ease of deployment, favourable long-term total cost of ownership and a robust, proven SAP connector are all outcomes that drove Toro’s choice of BI platform. The fact that the company’s user base was in the driving seat of its own project for its own requirements is testament to the ease with which BI can be rolled out and adopted.
We believe customers should be able to ask the questions they need to know about their organisation, and retrieve the answers on the fly, to instantly make better decisions, faster. When you’ve got this, you’ve then got DIY BI.
*Stuart Barnard is Managing Director of Inside Info.