Business Intelligence Expertise

What do finance, sales & marketing, product & supply chain, customer relationship management and corporate performance management have in common? These crucial functions can all be boosted through the use of Business Intelligence. Whether you wish to increase financial transparency, standardize reporting, target marketing campaigns, streamline the product and supply chain, Business Intelligence is part of the solution.

Where does BI make a difference?

Business Intelligence is used in order to:

• get a complete operational overview of your organisation
• consolidate critical data that is scattered across different systems
• produce better reports, faster
• integrate your organisation's strategic targets with your business management processes
• improve understanding of key business indicators
• make budgeting and planning less rigid and more flexible
• obtain adequate management data on all levels

Fact-based financial information

Financial administration has a lot to gain from Business Intelligence, such as improved financial transparency, unified financial reporting, as well as more accurate business forecasting and budgeting processes.  Business Intelligence makes it easier to base operational plans and budgets on the organisation's facts and development trends rather than guesstimates. At the same time key indicators and figures offer an accurate snapshot of the organisation's financial performance. 

 

More targeted sales & marketing

The accuracy of sales forecasting, the planning of future sales points and sales resources can be greatly improved with BI.  It is also much easier to plan effective marketing actions by using BI to monitor sales campaigns and customer behavior.

 

Monitor the performance of your PSC - Product and supply chain

BI allows you to monitor the operational effectiveness of your supply chain management with a wide range of performance indicators. This helps you identify those operations that leave room for improvement - whether they are in the product, ordering and supply chain, or customer services.  BI also helps you track demand and allows organisations to plan supplies and deliveries accordingly. Costly inventories can be reduced in terms of size and value. You can also analyse the efficiency of suppliers and distribution points.

Realize the full potential of CRM - customer relationship management

Within the area of CRM, BI provides analytical tools to help pinpoint information such as which customers are profitable, which products sell best in various markets, who is buying what, and which customers have not responded to the latest offers.  CRM data warehousing offers a valuable overview of your customers and allows you to analyze customer purchasing behaviour. This up-to-date understanding of your customer base helps you plan marketing campaigns, as well as optimal product and service portfolios.  CRM solutions also support management, business decision-making, and sales.

BI as an integral part of CPM - Corporate performance management

To make sure that your organization realizes its vision, strategy and targets, short-term and long-term planning is critical. In planning as well as budgeting, all the measures that will help realize these goals must be taken into account. This requires up-to-date data on true business result.  Taking advantage of CPM solutions that support budgeting and forecasting, offer different indicators and reporting methods, and support operational analysis, will help you realize your vision more effectively.

Getting started

The three most important questions that any savvy manager should ask when choosing a consultancy to assist them with a Business Intelligence (BI) project are:

• Will they really be able to understand my business and my business data?
• Will they give me a solution that provides me with the right information to make the right decisions?
• Will they be able to find the best, most cost effective technological solution for my business?

TradeTech Consulting knows your business and delivers

The ability to understand the business is probably the most important factor in developing a BI solution that actually delivers what you asked for.  BI, as the name implies, is about extracting the useful and relevant information from the vast morass of data within your organization to allow you to answer the really important questions: how is my business really performing and how can I make it perform better?

Many consultancies can offer you people with excellent technical skills ... but do they also have the real-world business skills to truly understand what business information is important to you and why?  Almost every industry has its own unique set of drivers, measures, key success factors and even lexicons.  In addition, BI usually spans several different functions within an organization; finance and accounting, marketing and customer relationship management, logistics and supply chain, manufacturing and human resources.  Only business people with “hands on” experience in your industry and business function will have the necessary knowledge and experience to properly grasp your business intelligence requirements.

In-depth industry experience

At TradeTech, our BI consultants not only have excellent academic backgrounds in technology and business, but they also have in-depth industry experience in:

• Banking and Finance
• Insurance & Financial Services
• Corporate Treasury Management
• Asset Management
• Construction
• Energy

This is not a happy coincidence, but the result of realizing that truly successful BI consultants need to have excellent business and industry-specific knowledge.  This means that our consultants are well positioned to be able to clearly understand your business needs and translate this into a business intelligence solution that meets these needs.  Our cross-industry experience also means that we can apply several different perspectives to common business problems to come up with truly innovative solutions.

Advanced technical skills

To some business people, BI is about building data warehouses.  To others, BI is about management reports and performance management tools like scorecards.  In fact, BI is about all of these things:

• Extracting and consolidating data from disparate data sources within the enterprise
• Storing this data in a data warehouse
• Creating the business reports and analysis tools to turn data into business information
• Presenting business information to decision makers in a meaningful way so that they can use to make better decisions. 

This means that your BI consultant team has to have a wide range of technical skills to develop a complete, end-to-end BI solution for you.  A team that only consists of “techie” developers and database “gurus” simply do not have the range of skills to create a cohesive technical solution that spans the entire “stack” of BI tools and technologies.

Our approach at TradeTech has been to deliberately seek out BI consultants with diverse, but complementing, technical backgrounds.  Our BI team has people who have previously worked as application developers, database designers, system architects, IT strategists and business analysts.  This gives our BI team that unique blend of technical experience needed to ensure that your business intelligence solution becomes a reality.