Business intelligence + enterprise resource planning = competitive advantage

Business intelligence is now joining up with enterprise resource planning - enabling firms to link strategy to decisions to execution to insight. Timo Elliott believes this delivers three significant advantages to organisations.

By Timo Elliott, Business Objects

In the past, business intelligence (BI) simply meant software designed to enable organisations to understand their business. Today it has evolved to become a term describing how organisations use and analyse information to make decisions and manage performance. It has moved from an application used on a limited project basis to multiple applications that can be utilised not just at a departmental or company-wide level but across an organisation’s entire business network.

BI technology is now much easier to use. Gone are the slow and archaic systems. Today’s BI tools are sophisticated and user-friendly, enabling companies to improve the way they do business; supporting top business goals, attracting and retaining new customers and creating new products and services. So it is no wonder that business intelligence is the number one technology priority for CIOs, according to a survey released by Gartner in January this year.

Today, businesses globally are facing a challenge. A jump in the amount and types of data they are accumulating has led to the creation of isolated silos of information across departments. This results in a lack of shared knowledge, inefficiency and subsequent loss in potential revenue. In addition there is increased pressure for businesses to respond dynamically to industry change and be more agile in their planning capabilities.

Now BI tools can rise to the challenge analysing both structured and unstructured data. BI software has historically focused on enabling organisations to gather information and form it into insights, enabling everyone to access it with appropriate interfaces for their various needs. Today, BI tools are capable of a lot more and are used much more for strategic decision making.

Strategy management tools help explain and measure the progress of new initiatives, while financial planning and budgeting tools ensure the required resources are available. All this helps stored information drive change in a business. However, perhaps the most significant change is that BI tools now also take risk, appropriate rules and regulations into account allowing organisations to make better informed decisions.

Major development

Another major new development in the market is that BI is now joining up with enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP’s recent acquisition of Business Objects is a great example of this. Research by the Balanced Scorecard Consortium found that nine out of ten companies fail to execute their corporate strategy. Through joining BI with ERP, organisations can link strategy to decisions to execution to insight all using a single vendor.

This offers three main advantages to organisations. The first is greater efficiency. As intelligence is embedded directly into business processes, staff on the ground are able to make appropriate decisions, such as cross-selling appropriate products to customers who call in for support. Secondly the insight offered allows people to use knowledge of where people are within an organisation, including their strategic involvement and objectives, to automatically offer them appropriate information rather than forcing them to search for it.

Lastly, businesses profit from greater flexibility as changes to business processes are driven directly by analytics with every level of staff being given the tools they need to understand the bigger strategy and make more effective decisions within their day-to-day work. Disneyland Paris, a customer of Business Objects, is a great example of how integrating these new developments in BI can enable an organisation to really make a difference to both customer satisfaction and profitability.

Using data inputs from over 900 sources, including structured information such as number of visitors entering the park as well as unstructured information such as customer perceptions of waiting times, Disneyland Paris has analysed historical trends in order to develop a system that manages services in real time. This raw data is available to Disneyland Paris’ team of experts but is converted into easily understood, colour-coded indicators for ease of use by operational staff. To ensure these staff are on the ground at the exact locations where visitors need them, all managers are issued with a PDA to receive real-time information every 15 minutes.

This identifies any problems and allows managers to quickly reallocate staff and resources or redirect visitors to quickly reduce bottlenecks as necessary. The result is optimal staffing levels and shorter queuing times, and of course - improved customer satisfaction. Following an increase in profitability in the Paris resort, Disney has rolled out BI in the United States. For this Business Objects customer, the vision for the future is to expand BI usage further. This will allow visitors access to some of this data and enable them to optimise their decisions about their day. So, should they visit Space Mountain or Tower of Terror next?

Timo Elliott is senior director of strategic marketing at Business Objects.

Other articles in this focus report:

• BI market consolidation: What does it mean for you?


• Business intelligence: Only the tip of the iceberg


• Data: Unused, unanalysed and undervalued?


• Business intelligence in action


• Business intelligence vendors