Business Intelligence For Management Information Systems Is Crucial For Effective Decision-making. (70 Characters)

Types of Decisions

Discuss about the Business Intelligence for Management Information Systems.

Business Intelligence is a technology for analysing information or data used by many Company and Organisation for realising the past and forecasting the future. It is an idea by which the company or organisation take their decision for developing their economy growth. Business Intelligence consists of many tools, applications, and methodological analysis that help organisations to collect their data from their various sources like internal sources or external sources or both of them (O’Brien, 2003). Sense Networks is also using the data fetched by the cell phones, GPS, and wifi. The data is used by the data miners to get information about a range of customers. Sense networks are using this technology to benefit their work process. GSK also usage the Business Intelligence for their business benefit by collecting a range of data from the supply chain planning system and using it for business forecasting.  GSK has an own developed model which is used to analyse and prepare the stock, production, and inventory. It is a tool that is used for developing business, economy as well as the fame of the company. In business their many facts are factor mattered when a company or organisations doing their business like customers, business partners, economic environment, internal operations and competitors to make the business effective and well quality business decisions. Giant food stores have also employed Business Intelligence helps to make this kind of decisions. In specialised field of Business Intelligence, it has the name of competitive intelligence which focuses on the extraneous competitive atmosphere (Bargshady, 2014). In this competition information or data is gathered on the action of the activity of competitors and decisions are made based on the information or data. It is initially driven by user demand. One sample of BI example is given below:

There are various types of problem are happened during a business. Then decision had to be made by the company. Decision-making is the most important and hardest step of a business in which the managers have to take a decision which can become beneficial for the company in long term. Each company has to take different decisions based upon work of different departments, Giant food stores have used the Business Intelligence for the pricing strategies whereas GSK is using the BI for inventory control strategies. I have mentioned some of the types of decisions they will have to take in Business.

Process

Marketing Decision: Marketing decision is mainly used to choose and place the product at appropriate market. The previous sales of a market will be analysed and the future strategies of the company regarding the product base and the product selection. Sales and marketing are considered as one of the most important department and the decision was taken by the manager could help the company in analysing and making a plan for the future of the company. Giant food Stores has to take care of the pricing strategies to stay competitive in the market.

Production or manufacturing Department: The Business intelligence tools helps the organization by updating the manufacturing managers with the updating the changing market and the changing product portfolios. Managers of the company can estimate the changing product needs and increase and decrease the production. There are different tools which are being used by the manufacturers for the manufacturing process and data processing and reporting. Enterprise manufacturing intelligence, in one of such software which is being used by the companies in the case of manufacturing and future production.

Finance Department: The Business intelligence reduces the Information bottlenecks as it allows the end users to extract the data from the database of the company. The finance department can be get benefitted with the help of the business intelligence. The business intelligence tool will be used to calculate and evaluate the data related to the company’s overall transaction. This usefulness of the company will help them in creating a business oriented approach. Different Financial related problems like data entry and evaluation will be easily done by the tools and a report will be produced which will use by the finance managers in taking different decisions as per the situation.

Inventory Management: In this case company has to take care of their stocks and supply chain management. The Inventory management can be done with the help of Business Intelligence. GSK has effectively implemented BI methodology for the inventory management in the company.

The Business Intelligence support the decision-making the process as it helps to improve the information quality in various ways, which includes the faster access to information, easier querying, and analysis, it also improved the data consistency with the help of data integration process and some other related data management activities. The implementation of the business intelligence involves in both the technology and organisational change. Therefore it contributes the primary to improve the quality of information content which can impact on the accomplishment of strategic business objectives improves the decision making. If we compare the earlier decision support system then it can be said that the business intelligence system has been derived from the concept of executive information system and provide artificial intelligence capabilities and also the powerful analytical capabilities as well. It includes some of the features like online analytical processing, predictive analytics, data mining, alerts and notification, scorecards and dashboard and querying and reporting the data visualisations.

Advantages

Some of the advantages of using this business intelligence in the organisation are:

It helps to improve the business productivity. Businesses channel their vital resources and workforce to improve the business productivity and the business intelligence help to gather the work.

All the crucial information are easily accessed, as the business intelligence provide the crucial information to the company to improve their ability to make a quick decision.

Business intelligence also ensures the stronger ROI (Return on Investment ) because of this the company can easily reduce the cost, improve the margin of the business, enhance their revenue , drive cost avoidance and much more.  Other than this t also improve the business efficiency , employee productivity , customer satisfaction and strategic decision making.

It improved the decision making as it reports based on accurate and timely information which help the companies to measure their performance of their throughout process.

The types of tools which are used in business intelligence are :

Spreadsheets

OLAP

Data mining

Data warehousing

Process visualization

Local Information systems

Reporting and querying software

Digital dashboards

Except for the spreadsheet all other tools are provided as standalone tools or the components of ERP system, or the components of a software target to a specific industry.

There are various techniques which are used to analyse the business process data. This technique is known as Business intelligence. The business intelligence mainly deals with capturing and accessing the various aspects of an enterprise, it customers and competitors. The business intelligence techniques are used to gather, store, analyze and provide access to intelligence information about the enterprise data which help to identify the significant trends and patterns which assist the decision-making process. Therefore the businessman can make a more accurate decision which is more tactical and strategic managerial issues like it help to determine the supply chain which is competing in a specific marketing. The different application which is commonly used in business intelligence is decision support system which is used for the query, reporting, online analytical processing, forecasting, and data mining and statistical analysis. This application mainly gathers data from a data warehouse or a data mart and all this become a part od data enterprise resource planning system (Cui, 2007).

The business Intelligence methodologies are commonly used to improve the organisational performance:

It measures all the activities of the company or business to determine the performance metrics which provide all the information about the progress towards the business goal to the manager of the company. The performance management methodology which includes the set of tools is Portals, scorecards or dashboards.

Tools

Some of the Analytical activities which develop the quantitative process for optimal decision making and perform a business knowledge discovery (Schiff, 2013).

Then there are different reporting activities which help to develop an infrastructure specifically for strategic reporting to provide the strategic decision-making mechanism of a business. These activities involve tools such as data visualization and OLAP.

One more methodology which is used in business intelligence is the knowledge management activities which use to create, distribute , represent and adopt the experience of true business

Collaborative activities which help to provide different parties to work together through the data sharing and electronic data interchange (Schiff, 2013).

As we can understand from the part An analysis the Business Intelligence can be considered as one of the tools which are being used by the companies for their business easiness. The BI tools can be used to analyse the data as well as it can be used to predict the future aspect of the present business. I have selected two different organizations namely GSK and Giant food stores. These two companies have implemented the Business Intelligence in the company operation and in the decision-making process. The dashboard feature of the software tool is used by the company in which they have used the graphics support of the software to effectively analyse the problems associated. The company has used the dashboard to give better and graphical views for the opportunity pipeline. This feature has helped the managers in suggesting a better location for the company product sales. Giant food stores have used these features for benefitting their business in this competitive environment. GSK used the Business Intelligence process in Inventory management. We can call it a productive use of the Business Intelligence in the business. Apart from these two sense networks has collected data’s related with the customers and used in customer network building.

Two of the companies have used different data analytics as well as other business intelligence tools which were required to analyse the data and produce a result which will help in the decision-making process. They got benefitted with the use of Business Intelligence in different aspects, GSK as well as Sense Network has used the Business Intelligence in their business process.

Decision making:   Giant food stores has used the Business Intelligence in the business price strategies. They have used the BI for pricing strategies and decision-making process. Each department of the company got benefitted with the help of the Business Intelligence tools they have used.

Uses

Cost and Time: One of the benefits of the Business Intelligence is its productivity; companies can use these tools in the decision-making process. The time associated with the traditional way was much higher than the time taken with the help of Business intelligence. Removing the complexity of the work helps the company in saving time and cost.  Now the data entry and manipulation in both the companies are much easier and faster (Stackowiak, 2007).

Employee empowerment: Business Intelligence also empowers the employees of a company. In the case of these two companies the employees or the managers involved with different operational work get benefitted with the business Intelligence. The business intelligence is one of the tools which can be used to predict the future trend and ongoing market trend. Now managers can use these technologies to analyse the present situation and take up different initiatives to proceed with the changes prospect (Stackowiak, 2007).

Technologies have changed the business style and the way they operate at present. The innovation of the cloud computing, Big data, data mining is helping companies in their day to day operation. One of the best ways of collecting information’s and analysing the related data for the business benefit is done by the Big data and analytics. At present data present in the information technologies can be used in the business process decision making.

Big data: A large number of Data present in the companies need to be analysed so that it can be used for the business benefits. For IT companies the emergence of Big data is about more than deploying a software or an application. The importance of the Big is grown to a significant amount as it provides a quick source to the companies to analyse the data. Data creating is taking place at an unprecedented rate and at present it is growing at a rate of around 60% per year (Villars, 2016). The presence of the data whether structured or unstructured helps the companies in taking new approach regarding the business. Big data analytics tools such as Hadoop can be used to analyse the large amount of data (Kirkpatrick, 2013). Sense Network has been using Data mining process to get relevant information’s from a large database. These are some usage of emerging technologies in the companies.

Cloud computing: Cloud computing is another technological innovation which is helping the companies in improving the present storage and networking concepts. Cloud facility enables the companies to access the data and transfer the required data and information to different branches of the company. Cloud technology is increasing their base among the companies as many of the organizations considers this as a cost effective and required substitute for the traditional storage and data sharing options. There are some risks associated with the Cloud services which are needed to be addressed by the management of a company before deploying the cloud facility in the organization. They can also use cloud services as the infrastructure and service for the company, cloud services are generally provided by the third party providers of the company. Cloud-based services are less costly as compared to the traditional facilities (BCS, 2012).

Changes which are being carried out with these technological innovations will help the organizations in creating the most business-friendly environment. These technological changes would help the companies in different ways, they will be more productive and result oriented. Business Intelligence will help the company managers in making appropriate decisions for the betterment of the organization. It helps to improve the information quality in various ways, which includes the faster access to information, easier querying, and analysis, it also improved the data consistency with the help of data integration process and some other related data management activities.

Time and cost associated with the company operation and functions will be reducing to a significant amount. Now the business decisions will be more result oriented and perfect than the previous traditional decision-making process. Big data and cloud computing are providing a range of services which will benefit the organizations in adding values to the organizations. Now with the help of the technologies GSK, Giant food store, sense network and all the 7 companies are getting benefitted through it. Companies are using BI in the decision-making process, inventory management, Customer relationship management as well as in marketing decisions.

Conclusion:

The report is based on business Intelligence and its usage at present in the organizations. Business Intelligence is considered as one of the ideas by which the company or organisation take their decision for developing their economy growth. The report analyses 7 different case studies which are using Business Intelligence and latest technologies for their business. Business Intelligence consists of many tools, applications, and methodological analysis that help an organisation. The report described different factors which are related to the business Intelligence. It is used by the companies in enhancing the business decision-making process. Business Intelligence tool is used to analyse the previous data related to the company and creating a report which will present a throughout analysis of the report for the company. This report will be used by the company managers in taking decisions. As we know the technologies are being used by the companies in making the whole process easy for the company

Reference

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