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The crisis increased interest in Business Intelligence by 65 percent

Interest in sophisticated analysis of company data – so called Business Intelligence (BI) analysis – increases rapidly even in the time when many companies struggle with recession. The system integrator S&T CZ has recorded 65% year-to-year growth of customer orders.

BI enables companies getting of strategic important information from their data. “In time of economic growth the data analysis was often underestimated. Nowadays companies strive to increase their profitability, discover new business opportunities or reduce costs with help of BI,” says Stepan Kutaj, Business Intelligence system specialist in S&T CZ.

While mainly big companies have been interested in data analysis in the past, now also mid-size organisations think about BI. “Many manufacturing companies, which used BI only rarely before, now become BI users. With its help they could reveal hidden reserves and do not need to reduce production. Many our customers avoided redundancy and some even had to hire new employees,” explains Stepan Kutaj.

Growing interest in BI relates also to changing approach of managers, who want to understand better where their costs and their customer’s behaviour come from. “Competitiveness pressure forces management to make decisions based on consistent data a and not by trial and error system. Where in the past managers were happy with a static view to data, they ask now for their flexible analysis. BI tools can trace a problem up to its beginning,” says Kutaj.

Business Intelligence software can be effectively applied anywhere. Most often it is used for profitability monitoring and maximising, for customer and product analysis, marketing studies or monitoring of everyday operations.

Fair appraisal of performance

BI tools are frequently used in “core business” system analysis, i.e. processes directly influencing company operations. “The customer only defines what information he wishes to obtain. BI experts themselves then put together data outputs from different systems, e.g. customer relationship (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) or enterprise systems (ERP). Results are then presented in clear and understandable graphs,” specifies Kutaj.

BI tools can evaluate performance of individual employees and possibly increase their number or give them better motivation, for example special benefits. “People sometimes do not like BI tools. They may feel the company wants to have the whip over employees. o fear is necessary because BI represents the only fair tool for the real work performance,” closes Stepan Kutaj, Business Intelligence system specialist in S&T CZ.