Can Business Intelligence benefit Small Businesses?
Posted on Wed, Jan 18, 2012
Sometimes Small and even some Medium sized businesses are afraid to implement Business Intelligence solutions due to ignorance, fear of cost or complexity, lack of knowledge or an appreciation of what the benefits of a BI solution might be.
In general terms if you feel that you know everything about how your business works both internally and externally with your customers then you do not need Business Intelligence, but if you feel that you could reduce costs and also increase sales by understanding more about yourbusiness then you will benefit from BI.
Business intelligence solutions can pull data from multiple operational systems (finance, sales, supply chain management, etc.), integrate it, analyze it and present it in easily digestible form as graphs, charts and dials on screen-based "dashboards."
BI answers questions such as: Which are my best customers? Which are my most profitable products or services? Which are my most efficient locations? How much will it cost to open a new territory? Where am I wasting money?
"It's about being able to make smarter business decisions and gain insights into what drives the business: where the costs are, where the costs are leaking, where the opportunities are -- real tactical issues that make a bottom-line difference in how you run your business,"
A study commissioned last year by QlikTech from IT analyst firm IDC concluded that the average payback period for a QlikView implementation was an impressively short 198 days. The average return on investment (ROI) reported across all QlikView implementations was 186 percent, and the ROI benefits included an average 16 percent increase in revenue and 20 percent reduction in operating costs.
QlikPower is a BI specialist that has developed a series of BI Analytic Dashboards that are ready to go and can be deployed with your ERP system in a matter of hours. They call this the Q Series of BI solutions and the first product to be available is Q 200 for sage 200 Users.
Q 200 will deliver a much faster ROI because we have deleoped the product around our existing customers stated problems and we know that they have the same issues as most other Sage 200 installations'' said Noel Shannon - Director of QlikPower.