Maximize Your Business Intelligence Quotient

Competitive advantage, improved compliance and more depends on making the most of BI.

By Kiran Cavale, Global Head of Satyam's BI and PM Practice and Swamy Srinivasan, Head, BI and PM Solutions, Marketing and Alliance, BI and PM Practice, Satyam

Business intelligence (BI) has cracked the top 10 priorities for CIOs, taking a place alongside enterprise resource planning (ERP) and IT infrastructure projects in recent surveys. Satyam's customer data shows increased investment and interest in this space during the past 18 months, as well.

This uptick in CIO interest is based on several reasons. Most important: Having fully mature and integrated BI is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. BI drives enterprise transformation by creating transparency into business information. Equally important, enterprisewide BI solutions enable a sharper focus on performance management. Predictive analytics enable enterprises to monitor present and future costs and expenditures.

As BI matures in an organization, it plays an increased role in helping the enterprise ensure data integrity on an ongoing basis, via active reporting on the quality of master data. Without accurate data, an organization will have difficulty reaching precise conclusions about business challenges and opportunities. Similarly, quality master data is important to managing risk and ensuring compliance with local, international and industry standards. Organizations can leverage enterprisewide reporting capabilities via user-friendly dashboards to meet compliance measures and mitigate risk. They are able to unify data and present an accurate and consolidated view of financials, sales, customer and safety information, or data related to whatever regulatory or self-imposed requirements a company must meet. This stands them in good stead to succeed. BI can identify trends and behavior that run counter to governmental or industry regulatory requirements — a feature that can and should capture executive attention.

Recent mergers and acquisition activity in many industries also increases demand for BI. Integrating the data of the two merging entities can be expensive. Thirty percent of Satyam's customers have indicated that this is a pain point for them. That's no surprise, given the merged company's need to manage the sudden increase in both customers and related data that winds up being channeled through disparate information systems after an acquisition. When a merger happens, companies need to improve reporting systems so they can quickly gather and analyze consolidated information.

Make BI Work for Your Company

It's evident that BI holds a lot of promise. But not every company seems able to fulfill its potential; their implementations are scattered in different pockets of the company and isolated from each other. The most successful companies feature a standardized and controlled approach to BI and analytics. That is, they consolidate and streamline processes and software in maturing implementations.

One of our customers, a research-based pharmaceuticals company headquartered in the U.K., had a diverse stack of BI and data warehousing applications spread across multiple business units. This resulted in higher overall licensing costs and led to problems trying to reuse process flows among various BI projects. Satyam helped establish a BI and DW Global Shared Service Framework to consolidate and standardize services, processes, technologies and solution delivery. The framework provided the flexibility to stretch the customer's limited IT budget. At the same time, it promoted the value of a shared BI and DW (data warehouse) services framework to stakeholders through standardization on a limited number of tools, infrastructure consolidation, and process and technology reuse, to name several initiatives.

The shared services framework saved the customer many millions of dollars. It helped the customer implement a profit-management solution in three months (against a stipulated time frame of seven months), and reduced project development effort by 30 percent. The shared services BI and DW framework also enhanced its revenue and program management process, creating effective management of intracompany sales processes for international markets. It also improved supply chain visibility by providing a 360-degree view of the customer's inventory, with defined metrics for volume and value measurements, seamless integration with third parties, and alerts for effective event management.

In another installation, an Australian telecom needed an end-to-end credit management solution. Satyam developed an Enterprise Data Warehouse for credit analytics processing, a credit decision support database to track customer behavior and make credit decisions, and a credit decision engine for risk management. It also enabled customer scoring for credit limits, the ability to identify delinquent accounts, and a credit decision reporting database for credit reporting. Key benefits included reducing delinquent payments and bad debt, as well as creating effective credit risk management, with appropriate products mapped to customers based on that customer's credit risk and regulatory compliance requirements for credit assessments. But most of all, it reduced the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure, saving millions of dollars in maintenance costs. The recovery of 2.5 terabytes of storage space, through design rationalization and space recovery techniques, was an additional bonus.