Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications that help organizations learn about and understand their business.

Why use Business Intelligence?

Companies use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. BI solutions give companies a way to streamline and unify the data collection, analysis and reporting process. BI solutions are built on a unified database, so everyone involved in the process gets a single, real-time view of the data.

How to benefit from Business Intelligence?

BI solutions have three main categories of functionality:

• Integration: covers how data is pulled out of other IT systems such as ERP and CRM. This includes tools to extract data, add metadata etc
• Analysis: covers tools for the user to analyze the data inside. This includes Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) enabling an analysis style known as 'slicing and dicing', Interactive visualization, Predictive modeling and data mining
• Information delivery: covers how the results are shown to the user. This includes Reporting, Dashboards, Scorecards, Ad hoc queries, search functionality etc.

BI platforms have long been defined by "how" they operated. With such intense focus on the mechanics of BI, many organizations lost sight of what they set out to accomplish — to make better decisions.

Yet, despite significant investments in BI and analytics made in the name of improving decisions, the vast majority of organizations make thousands of decisions each day that, without consistency across decision makers and without insight into how decisions are made or their effectiveness, often have poor outcomes.

Most BI platforms are currently deployed as systems of performance measurement, not for decision support. However, this is changing as organizations are recognizing that analytic capabilities are a very critical piece of the decision making process.That is why more and more organizations nowadays include advanced mathematical models and operations research techniques into their BI. The results from such optimization models can then be integrated easily into reports, dashboards etc. for better decision making.

What are the results of optimizing the use of Business Intelligence?

Optimizing the use of BI results in the following benefits and enables organizations to:

• Share information efficiently and effectively with people across your organization: BI makes it easy for everyone- from decision-makers to functional teams- to access and analyze up-to-date information anytime, anywhere. Everyone throughout the company can make better decisions, faster
• Empower people: providing employees with access to analytical data that is readily available and understandable allows them to work more effectively and support the overall business strategy
• Gain insights to understand and analyze your business performance: having a single source for accurate financial and operational information allows you to monitor the organization’s performance to make better informed and timely decisions that support the overall business strategy

Why contact ORTEC to optimize Business Intelligence?

ORTEC delivers BI solutions on top on and related to their optimization solutions:

• Integration: The BI-support module integrates the information from the ORTEC solutions with other applications (like ERP-system) towards BI-tools. By this, own employees can create BI-reports and analyze the results
• Analysis: ORTEC has a huge division on Data Analytics, specialized in analyzing large volumes of data (which can be related to involved ORTEC Solutions, but also external data sources), and delivering predictive or prescriptive analytical results. Related to this, ORTEC also has an Analytics Academy to train customers in analytics
• Information delivery: ORTEC has various modules to show results of the optimization solutions to the user. But additionally there are real-time and historical dashboards, available as an app on a tablet, where management can see and analyze the important key performance indicators over a period of time, and customers and drivers can see real-time information during the execution. The latter is also part of the ORTEC Control Tower solution