Sage BI
Sage BI is easy to use, affordable and provides considerable business benefits:
- Build significant competitive advantage
- Generate instant reports and save valuable time
- Obtain real intelligence about the behaviour of your markets, customers, operations, suppliers, business performance and much more
- Streamline business processes
- Analyse and interpret your business data
- Unlock data and information right across your business from finance to sales and marketing
- Quickly produce highly accurate reports and dashboards to help streamline your business processes
Business Information Accessed by ALL Decision Makers
Just as spreadsheets changed the nature of “number crunching,” the demand for always-accessible information is also drastically changing the role of financial managers. For instance, no longer is the spreadsheet just the domain of the financial department. Individuals and teams from lines of business to executive level employees throughout the organisation need to view, understand, and manipulate raw business data. While spreadsheets, on their own, are useful for presentation information, they often lack the depth and breadth needed for a full picture of departmental and enterprise performance They also do not effectively aggregate the data necessary to perform the required analysis across multiple or varied views of the business. Sage BI can help by integrating back-end systems with operations information, whilst presenting the information in the already familiar environment of an Excel Spreadsheet. A BI solution enables employees throughout the enterprise to Report, Analyse, Plan and Adapt to the data’s implications, with the result of optimising business performance.
Better, Faster Decision-Making
Over the past few years, companies have adopted BI solutions to provide information on everything from customer behaviours and loyalty trends to logistics efficiencies. But the achilles heel is that many BI systems only offer you a historical view of your business, which doesn’t address today’s rapidly changing business climate. The key to transitioning BI from a historical activity to a real-time, accurate view of the business as it is today is to use online analytical processing (OLAP) coupled with real-time alerting and workflow automation. OLAP is the BI analytic workhorse for business applications including sales and marketing analysis, planning, budgeting, statutory consolidation, profitability analysis, balanced scorecard, performance measurement and data warehouse reporting. OLAP feeds information from multiple data sources, reducing human errors and ensuring data integrity.
Because of the trend toward quarterly and rolling budgeting, and the need for frequent analysis of financial and operational information, the data gathering process has become time-consuming. With the ability to collect data as frequently as hourly, OLAP solutions dramatically reduce the data gathering time-sink and enable staff to spend most of their time analysing information.
Datel’s BI Consultancy
The Datel BI Consultancy comprises of a Consultancy Manager with over 17 years experience of delivering BI solutions using the markets leading products. This includes specific experience of the Sage BI software since its release into the BI market some 4 years ago and its integration with the Microsoft Business Intelligence software (Analysis Services).
The BI team also includes BI Applications Consultants who have extensive experience of the Sage product suite and the Microsoft SQL Server environment. The team has implemented over 60 BI applications delivering business benefits from data sourced from both Sage and non-Sage environments using the Datel BI Methodology detailed below.
The Datel Business Intelligence Development Methodology
Developing a BI system, integrating Microsoft SQL Server/Analysis Services with Sage Business Intelligence, (Sage BI), requires both a methodology and formalized project management approach. The degree to which the methodology and the project management discipline are applied to the project varies depending upon the size and complexity of the proposed solution and the timescales.
From a dynamic point of view the Datel development process is best described in terms of its phases.
Phases
There are four phases in the development of BI system integration. They are inception, elaboration, construction and transition. Each phase has specific purpose, outcomes and is concluded with a milestone - a point in time when certain critical decisions have to be made.
- Inception phase - The purpose of the inception phase is to define the scope of the system, which is facilitated through workshops with the Stakeholders. This phase also encompasses the Requirements Gathering Process, the purpose of which is to describe what the system should do. The output from this phase is the Project Scope document.
- Elaboration phase - During the elaboration phase the problem domain is analysed, a sound architectural foundation is established, and the Analysis and Design process aims to show how the system will be implemented. Design activities focus on describing the architecture of the system. The project plan is developed and the highest risk elements are mitigated or if necessary eliminated from the project.
- Construction Phase - During the construction phase, the remaining components and application features are developed/implemented and integrated into any existing systems. Each component or feature is then thoroughly tested.
- Transition Phase - During this phase, the system is transitioned to the user community. Once the BI solution is given to the end users, feedback is collated. This may in turn lead to the development of new releases, correction of problems or the completion of features that were postponed during previous phases. At the end of transition phase the system is made operational.