The Benefits of Business Intelligence
By Katie Foley
Today's manufacturers are faced with many challenges, from supply chain issues to ever changing customer preferences. Business Intelligence (BI) is an invaluable tool that allows manufacturers to thrive in this competitive industry by offering insights to drive efficiency, innovation, and growth.
Introduction
Let's start with the basics, what is Business Intelligence? According to CIO.com, Business Intelligence is "a set of strategies and technologies for analyzing business information and transforming it into actionable insights that inform strategic and tactical business decisions." Business Intelligence can be applied to many different industries so when it comes to manufacturing BI gives insight into topics such as Projects, Purchasing, Sales, and Inventory.
Business Intelligence Benefits
BI provides you with the tool-set for tailored reporting and analytics, thereby allowing you to control the information you see and need precisely at that moment. Below are just a few of the many benefits a Business Intelligence solution provides for manufacturers:
- Access and analyze key business data to make informed fact-based decisions faster.
- Empower users with tools to identify trends.
- Improve quality information and facilitate data consolidations.
- Provide consistent data across the organization so users can spend less time reconciling differences
- Replace home-grown or ineffective standard report writer products
- Reduce workload and impact on transactional systems
- Perform ad-hoc analysis using drag and drop functionality
Visibility's BI Functionality
While there are many BI solutions for manufacturers available on the open market, Visibility offers a robust BI solution that integrates seamlessly with Visibility ERP. Whether you are consider Visibility BI or not, here is some key functionality to look for when analyzing BI solutions:
- Project Analysis. The Project Analyzer allows you to view and analyze key data collected within the project accounting portion of Visibility ERP. Analyze what’s driving your business with information presented the way managers view their organization – cross tabs, pie charts, line graphs or bar charts.
- Purchasing Analysis. The Visibility Purchasing Analyzer helps maximize your purchasing control through cross tabs, pie charts, line graphs or bar charts. The cubes let you explore multidimensional information by navigating through increasing levels of detail, then simply slice and dice to view different dimensions of the selected data.
- Sales Analysis. The Visibility Sales Analyzer delivers comprehensive sales analysis capabilities with minimal implementation time and effort. Proven reporting functions allow users to analyze key indicators such as order details by territory, division, or sales representative.
- Inventory Analysis. Visibility’s Inventory Analyzer helps analyze what’s driving your business with the information presented in a way that makes sense including bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, spreadsheets, and dashboards. It is organized to enable you to quickly yet comprehensively explore your information by viewing it with and from multiple dimensions. Navigation is easy and the ability to slice the data into additional views and increasing detail is all a part of the solution.
Conclusion
Business Intelligence (BI) is vital to business success. Our BI module is not only a fully integrated module within Visibility ERP, but we also have pre-built business intelligence dashboards we deliver to customers out of the box to provide them with a starter kit to unleashing the power of business intelligence.
If you think Visibility Business Intelligence would be a good fit for your business or if you have questions about how it could improve your current processes, please get in touch with us. We can answer all your queries and help you get started with our technology. You can contact us online or give us a call at 978-269-6500.