Business Intelligence 101

Randy Archambault
Manager Business Intelligence and
Reporting
Palm Beach Tan

1
 Components of Success
• SSRS • 11 Years
• Webfocus
• Oracle
• Business Objects

Experienc
Platforms
e

Industries Education

• Hospitality • EMIS
• Insurance
• Retail

Education Management Information Systems

2
 SSRS-SQL Server Reporting Services
(SSRS)
is a server-based report generating software system from Microsoft

3
 WebFocus
WebFOCUS is an information retrieval tool created by
Information Builders and used in business intelligence. The
foundation of this tool is the WebFocus query and reporting
engine, which enables users to gain access to numerous
databases and file systems through a Web browser.

4
 Business Objects
Application Software allows business user to view sort
and analyze business intelligence

5
 Business Intelligence 101
What is Business Business Intelligence (BI) is about
Intelligence
getting the right information, to the
right decision makers, at the right time.
BI is an enterprise-wide platform that
supports reporting, analysis and
decision making.
BI leads to:
 fact-based decision making
“single version of the truth”

6
 Business Intelligence 101

What is Business  Making useful, actionable insight from stored

Intelligence data.(Using Data for Better Business Results)
 Allows effective business decisions to be made.
 The act of using historical data to gain new
information.
 Techniques include:
 multidimensional analyses
mathematical projection(statistics)
 modeling
 ad-hoc queries
'canned' reporting
Dashboards

7
 Questions BI is Designed to Answer

• What happened? Past

• What is happening?
• Why did it happen? Present
• What will happen?
• What do I want to happen? Future

Data Black
ERP CRM SCM 3Pty books
8
 Questions BI is Designed to Answer
A BI solution, with the right data and features, should
be able to take operational data and enable users to
answer specific questions such as:
Sales and marketing
 Which customers should I target?
 What has caused the change in my pipeline?
 Which are my most profitable campaigns per region?
 Did store sales spike when we advertised in the local paper or
launched an email campaign?
 What is the most profitable source of sales leads and how has that
changed over time?

9
 Questions BI is Designed to Answer
 Operational
 Which vendors are best at delivering on time and on budget?– How many
additional personnel do we need to add per store during the holidays?
 Which order processing processes are most inefficient?
 Financial
 What is the fully loaded cost of new products?
 What is the expected annual profit/loss based on current marketing and sales
forecasts?
 How are forecasts trending against the annual plan?
 What are the current trends in cash flow, accounts payable and accounts
receivable and how do they compare with plan?
 Overall business performance
 What are the most important risk factors impacting the company’s ability to
meet annual profit goals?
 Should we expand internationally and, if so, which geographic areas should we
first target?
10
 Business Intelligence Vision

Improving organizations by
providing business insights
to all employees leading to
better, faster, more
relevant decisions
Advanced Analytics
Self Service Reporting
End-User Analysis
Business Performance Management
Operational Applications
Embedded Analytics

11
 Examples of BI

hotel franchise uses BI analytical applications to

compile statistics on average occupancy and average
room rate to determine revenue generated per room. It
also gathers statistics on market share and data from
customer surveys from each hotel to determine its
competitive position in various markets. Such trends
can be analyzed year by year, month by month and
day by day, giving the corporation a picture of how
each individual hotel is faring.

12
 A bank bridges a legacy database with departmental
databases, giving branch managers and other users access to
BI applications to determine who the most profitable
customers are or which customers they should try to cross-
sell new products to. The use of these tools frees information
technology staff from the task of generating analytical reports
for the departments and it gives department personnel
autonomous access to a richer data source.
A telecommunications company maintains a multi terabyte
decision-support data warehouse and uses business
intelligence tools and utilities to let users access the data they
need without giving them carte blanche to access hundreds of
thousands of mission-critical records. The tools set
boundaries around the data that users can access, creating
data "cubes" that contain only the information that's relevant
to a particular user or group of users.
13
 Examples of BI

Microsoft BI Platform
14
 Business Intelligence Users

 Executives : Information is summarized and has been

4 Types of Users
defined for them. Users have the ability to view static
information online and/or print to a local printer.
 Casual Users
Casual users require the next level of detail from the
information that is provided to viewers. In addition to the
privileges of a viewer, casual users have the ability to
refresh report information and the ability to enter desired
information parameters for the purposes of performing
high-level research and analysis.
 Functional Users
Functional users need to perform detailed research and
analysis, which requires access to transactional data. In
addition to the privileges of a casual user, functional users
have the ability to develop their own ad hoc queries and
perform OLAP analysis.
 Super Users
Super users have a strong understanding of both the
business and technology to access and analyze transactional
data. They have full privileges to explore and analyze the
data with the BI applications available to them.
15
 Business Intelligence 101

Garbage in Garbage Out

GIGO used to refer to any decision-
making systems where failure to make
right decisions with precise, accurate data
could lead to wrong, nonsensical results.
Transform data in to actionable insight.

16
 Information Access Strategies

Adhoc

Data Standard
Mining Reports

Exceptio Olap and

n Based Drilldow
Reports n

17
 The Five Stages of BI
BI involves five stages of taking raw data and presenting it as
relevant, actionable insight to users.

18
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence
1.The Data: defining which data will be loaded into the
system and analyzed.
Where all information is stored
Technology dependent
 MSSQL, MYSQL, Oracle, Red Brick, DB2
 Often an OLAP type data source
Many rows of often summarized data
Utilize database queries to retrieve data from the source.
 SQL – MSSQL and MYSQL
 PL/SQL – Oracle

19
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

 OLTP
 Online Transaction processing
 Typically not your reporting database.
 Processes transactions fast for application
 Example
 Retail POS system
 Web Site
 Online Transaction Processing has two key benefits:
 Simplicity
 efficiency
 OLAP
 Online Analytical Processing
 Used for reporting
 May form base of data warehouse or BI tools
 Not used for transaction processing.
 Databases configured for OLAP use a multidimensional data model, allowing for
complex analytical and ad-hoc queries with a rapid execution time

20
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

 2.The ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) Engine: moving the

source data to the Data Warehouse.
This can be a complex step involving modifications and calculations
on the data itself.
 If this step doesn’t work properly, the BI solution simply cannot be
effective.
 3.Data Warehousing:
connects electronic data from different operational systems so that the
data can be queried and analyzed over time for business decision
making.
A data warehouse is an analytically oriented, integrated, time-variant,
and nonvolatile collection of data that supports decision making
processes
Large databases that aggregate data collected from multiple sources

21
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

 4.Analytic Engine:
analyzes multidimensional data sets found in a data warehouse
to identify trends, outliers, and patterns.
Data Mining
 is the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is becoming
an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information. It is
commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing,
surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery.
 Data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data but is often carried
out only on samples of data. The mining process will be ineffective if the
samples are not a good representation of the larger body of data.
 Data mining cannot discover patterns that may be present in the larger
body of data if those patterns are not present in the sample being "mined".

22
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence
5.Presentation Layer:
the dashboards, reports and alerts that present findings
from the analysis.
Typically Technology Agnostic
 The presentation layer is for the user.
 It does not care
 How?
 When ?
 Where?
 Why?
 the user accesses the Information just that it is available.

23
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence
 5.Presentation Layer:
Interactive Dashboards:
 A dashboard is a set of high-level reports on key metrics, typically for
managers.
 There may be multiple reports on a single dashboard, much the same way
that a car’s dashboard has multiple gauges and displays on it.
 With a dashboard, users can gain an at-a-glance understanding of key
trends and metrics. Dashboards can be customizable to work for anyone in
an organization, from a sales rep or frontline operations manager to a
middle manager or senior executive.
 An “interactive” dashboard allows users to take those dashboard reports
and filter information to more deeply analyze trends and results, or to
“drill down” into deeper and more detailed analysis of the data.
 That is, by clicking on the particular reports or results, they can explore
more detailed information to find root causes of results.

24
 The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence
5.Presentation Layer:
Customizable Reports:
 which can present high-level findings as well as enable a user to
drill down to find specific details. Most BI systems either come
with report templates and/or provide the capability to create and
customize reports.
Alerts:
 notifying users to changes selected as key to meeting user goals.
Alerts can be set to warn users on an imminent event, changes to
data, or that new data needs to be entered into the system.

25
 Conclusion

Business Intelligence solutions make it possible for

groups within organizations to gain actionable insight
from business data, and to leverage these insights to
meet critical goals.
Business intelligence solutions offer business-focused
analysis at a scale, complexity, and speed that is not
achievable with basic operational systems reporting or
spreadsheet analysis, thereby delivering significant
value.

32