4 Business Process Automation Success Stories
If you're one of those people that think the time to buy a BI reporting software is when the number of reports becomes too time-consuming for staff to run themselves, you're missing out on some incredible BPA opportunities.
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If you want to know why, you’ve got to capture what
What would you say if I told you that you already have the information you need to double, triple, even quadruple your business? It's there just waiting for you to tap into it.
Last month, I gave you 5 tips to help you maintain the integrity of the data in your databases.
This month's lesson is designed to help you understand what business intelligence data you need to capture as it happens, and I'm going to use Dan, a moderately successful small business owner, to illustrate my point.
Read this month's article: "With Business Intelligence, It's What You Don't Know that Hurts" and learn how to turn everyday data into useful business intelligence information.
You’re only as smart as your data
Good data is the cornerstone of any business intelligence project, and good data requires forethought.
Let's say, for example, that you want a BI report that breaks down sales by state. Obviously, you'll need a field in your database that identifies the state in order to sort. If you don't do anything to police the sales data as it's captured, your database will probably contain sales transactions for CA, Calif, and Cal.
Tp get an accurate picture of all the sales that occurred in California, your search query would need to account for these well-known abbreviations, plus any nonstandard abbreviations (and typos!) that people may input.
This month's article contains 5 tips that will help you ensure the integrity of the data in your database. Next month, I'll talk in detail about the fields you'll need in order to have the reports you want.
Business intelligence for small businesses
Many small business owners think business intelligence is unattainable or unnecessary until they grow to a certain size. Even the industry term itself -- "business intelligence" -- sounds complicated and expensive.
But once you get past the technical jargon, you'll realize that BI is just common sense applied to business. Let me explain...
The hidden costs of bargain BI automation software
Purchase price and ongoing software maintenance are just two things you need to consider when calculating the TCO for a BI report generation and scheduling software.
Things like:
- How long will it take to implement and deploy the software?
- How many workarounds will be needed to get the software to do what you want it to do?
- What other licenses (e.g. Crystal Reports) will be required to use the BI report scheduling software? and
- How much time will your staff spend monitoring the software and handling support calls?
Can quickly eat up any savings gained by going with a cheaper BI software.
Automate more than reports with these 3 BI scheduling software features
Think you need to buy a special business process automation software to automate accounting, inventory, compliance, or other activities?
3 questions that will eliminate BI buyer’s remorse
The devil's in the details....
While many BI report generation and scheduling softwares will (on the surface) appear to meet your criteria, there are subtle differences that make some products rigid, more costly to maintain, and less likely to scale.
Business Intelligence: A Double-Edged Sword?
Why is it that something that can make a company loads more profitable can also significantly hurt productivity? Case in point: business intelligence. Internal users get a taste of business intelligence… their appetite for information becomes insatiable… and IT productivity tanks.
Usually I meet the IT person when they’ve reached their limit and can no longer afford to manually build reports for the entire company. They download our free 30-day trial of CRD, MARS, or SQL-RD because they want to get out of the drudgery of report generation, but they don’t always think about how the demand for BI reports also hurts their users’ productivity.
If you want to get ahead of the BI curve, here are 4 business process management features that will make your business users say “I love you, man.”