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03.14.07
Business Intelligence Gets Smart(er)
 By
Jack Doran
Companies are using business intelligence software for more than simple data mining. They're using it to identify hot sellers, cut costs and discover new business.
IT LOOKED LIKE your average faux fish, mounted on a faux wood plaque. But when you walked by, the fish would turn its head, open its mouth and start singing, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or "Take Me to the River." Pure kitsch. And as it turned out, pure gold for the True Value store owners lucky enough to have them in stock. "It was a hit," says Neil Hastie, former CIO of TruServ, a member-owned hardware cooperative of 7,000 or so independent retailers. "We ran out of them." So when the same company came out with a gopher singing "I'm All Right"--remember Caddyshack?--it seemed like a sure bet. "Everyone thinks, 'God, this is the second fish! Let's order the hell out of it.' So we did," Hastie says. "We ended up with truckloads of gophers we couldn't give away."
Fortunately for TruServ, the company had business intelligence (BI) software that helped it recognize the gopher fiasco early enough to liquidate the unwanted rodents and recoup some of its expenses. That ability to quickly make sense of oceans of data can be a competitive advantage, making BI software essential for many companies.
A 2003 Forrester Research report found that 45 percent of companies surveyed planned to shop for BI software this year, which explains why vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos have seen double-digit increases in their revenue. With today's BI tools, business folks can jump in and start slicing and dicing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports.
A broad range of applications for BI is helping companies rack up impressive ROI figures. Business intelligence is being used to identify cost-cutting ideas, uncover new business opportunities, roll ERP data into accessible reports, react quickly to retail demand and optimize prices. TruServ's Hastie, for example, spent $250,000 on BI software from Business Objects and says the investment paid off in about two months. Besides using it to track anomalies like the gophers through an executive dashboard, TruServ is also pressing it into service as a CRM tool and is using it to integrate data from disparate accounting systems, which will help the company close its books two days earlier every month.
Time To Leverage That Data
To get at that data stuck in corporate America's big-ticket enterprise systems, many companies are turning to BI software. "We've seen a number of companies that invested a lot in ERP or CRM that have not necessarily seen the big returns they expected," says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. "They're looking to BI as a way to, with a small additional investment, squeeze additional value out of those systems."
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About the Author:
I am working on http://www.softwarereviewblog.com. I usually publish articles regarding latest software tools of different categories which are mentioned in my weblog. I am also handling article marketing of this Blog.
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