Business Intelligence Tools in Data Warehouse

Business Intelligence Tool Guide

  Business Intelligence Tools assist organizations to improve their overall performance by helping them to plan, track, monitor, analyze and report the business activities. These tools improve customer relationship management thereby increasing company's profitability significantly. Below are the few guidelines which may be of help while working with BI tools  

• How to install and setup the BI software?

• How to get license and training from BI software vendors?

• How to create users, administrators and assign privileges to users?

• How to connect to the different database servers from BI applications?

• How to understand and work on BI data models or universe?

• How to frame the select statement according to the business requirements?
  • o How to select the tables that have to be used in the report? o How to select the columns that are required for reporting?o How to write the join condition to join (inner join, outer join, equi join) different tables in select statement? o How to write multiple select statements in a single report?o How to write the filters (null, in, equal to, greater than) that are required after the where clause? o How to create dimensions and facts?o How to drill up and drill down?o How to set user prompts for user to enter values? o How to process the query and retrieve the results?

• How to work on results?
  • • How to modify field formats?
    • How to sort data?
    • How to create computer items like date functions, numeric and string functions?

• How to create pivots?
  • • How to add data?
    • How to create totals?
    • How to group data?

• How to create charts?

• How to create reports?
  • • How to work on reporting body?
    • How to work on report group headers?
    • How to work on report header/footer?
    • How to work on page header/footer?
    • How to design the report layout?
    • How to use page breaks?

• How to schedule, monitor, modify, delete, and refresh a job(report)?

• How to write report design document, /report testing document, test reports and get user acceptance?

• How to distribute reports and results via email, printers, intranet server, and web?

• How to export and import data?

• How to track on scorecards, balancing scorecards, forecasting, key performance indicators and dashboards?

Business Intelligence & Key Performance Indicators

  Key Performance Indicators, commonly referred to as KPIs, are a list of measurements that are identified as critical factors in achieving the organizational goals or mission. KPIs are often identified in a business to help them drive a business towards its success and are associated with a number of business activities like Customer Relationship Management(CRM), Supply Chain Analytics or any other activity that is happening within the organization.  

Requirements of a good KPI

  There can be a number of factors related with the success of a company; All of these factors cannot be chosen as the indicators; Only those that are mission critical, strictly adhering to the organizational goals and accurately measurable should be selected as the company's KPIs. It is always better to keep the number of KPIs to a minimum to make sure that greater focus can be given to each of these indicators. So the important factors to be considered in selecting a KPI are as follows:  

• Measurable: A KPI should be quantifiable in terms of numbers.

• Reflect the organizational Goals: A KPI should drive a business towards success.

• Actionable: It should help the managers to initiate some business action as a result of all the analysis and measures lead by KPI.

Examples of KPIs

  A KPI may reflect regional sales by sales person, supply chain statistics by supplier, productivity by units, customer satisfaction, customer growth or it may reflect employee turnover. In either case, it should give a high-level, real time information to the top level managers enabling them to concentrate in the company's success.