The emergence of cost effective ‘Business Intelligence Reporting System’

Business Intelligence transforms the raw data captured in the form of Tally, ERP or any other customized software into meaningful and useful information in the form of automated MIS through web portal, scheduled emails and mobile apps. This aids the management to tackle competition and take strategic decisions quicker. The world is rapidly understanding the need for BI as it offers an excellent control on one’s business. Lots of successful businesses in ecommerce, insurance, telecom and other sectors etc are using BI in a big way. No wonder they have tasted success in their respective fields in a short span of time. A number of bluechip companies have got the first mover advantage of early adoption of BI solutions. However, small and midcap companies are still laggards.

BI solutions unlike traditional MIS supports customer retention by highlighting customer loss with the help data analytics which otherwise focused only on high cost activity of new customer acquisitions. BI also provides assistance to focus on inventory management, the cost of inaccurate stocking can possess a big risk to the organization in terms of escalating costs. Frequent errors in spreadsheets with respect to manual entries are all negated since BI captures the data from the database itself and thereby avoiding any inaccuracies.

Some BI softwares have source code that cannot be viewed or modified by anyone but the person, team, or organization who created it and maintains exclusive control over it. This kind of software is frequently called "proprietary software" or "closed source" software, because its source code is the property of its original authors. Therefore they charge licence fees to the user which can contribute a major portion of the cost of the software.

Open source BI software is different. Its authors make its source code available to others who would like to view that code, copy it, learn from it, alter it, or share it. Most open source licenses require them to release their source code when they sell software to others, many open source software programmers find that charging users money for software services and support (rather than for the software itself) is more lucrative. This way, their software remains free of charge and they make money helping others install, use, and troubleshoot it. Lack of awareness among corporate with respect to availability of affordable open source BI solutions has led to delay in its implementation and thereby hindering the possibility of a faster growth for their company.

Salient features of Business intelligence reporting are as follows : -

• Scheduled emails
• Web Portal
• OLAP
• Mobile accessibility