Better, faster decision-making
DesignBi helps you deliver better information, quicker, to a wider audience at less cost.
Turning data into information and information into actions
Adding targets and assigning responsibilities turns “static” data into information that can be acted upon
Removing the “data silos” allows new insights into your data.
Adding structure to, and visualizing, the data
Adding structure where none exists
Dashboard and reporting tools that drill from summary to low level, no matter how large the volume of data.
Not just a suite of reporting tools
A complete system for moving your data to a central data warehouse, structured for great reporting.
Affordable
Faster deployment with all the tools you need.
DesignBi is a business intelligence software system that enables you to deliver better information, quicker, to a wider audience at less cost
If you recognize any of these problems in your business, DesignBi is for you
• Making sense of large volumes of unstructured data.
This can be costly and time-consuming. To unlock the information within it’s common to see staff locked into a cycle of hand-crafting reports that summarize and give structure to data so that it is in a format acceptable and understandable to managers.
| An example: an unstructured 3,000-line aged debtor report delivers a problem (what, and where, is the key information) rather than immediately useful information. |
• The “data silo” problemThe information you want is held in different, unlinked systems (or unlinked “modules” within one system).
For example, maybe you have great ERP, CRM, credit-rating systems and so on, but as a consequence your customer data is now straddling three systems. If you wanted to
Another example: Your budgets and forecasts are held in spreadsheets and your actual results are in your finance system. So every month P&L data by profit center is |
• The need for better reporting (“The data is there but I can’t get at it”).
Many operational systems are built using relational database technology, which is an ideal choice for ensuring the integrity of data but is not great for reporting. The performance of operational systems can quickly degrade if large numbers of users are given free reign to run queries and reports, particularly if there are many thousands, or millions or more records.
| For example your operational system might easily answer this ‘show me the outstanding debt for customer X’, but will be less capable of answering questions like ‘give me the outstanding debt for high risk US retail customers last year managed by Manager Y’. |
How DesignBi can help you deliver better information Reporting tools alone, no matter how impressive, provide little or no help with the above problems because they cannot address the two fundamental issues: data (potentially lots of it) sitting in different places and not stored optimally for reporting.
• Addressing the fundamentalsDesign and build a central data store (a data warehouse), where the data is stored optimally for great reporting, even when the volumes are enormous; and automatically extract,
transform and load data from various sources (operational system databases, files etc) to
the central store.
Notice that this replaces the “Extract report data->Combine-> Report” approach which is cumbersome and inefficient.
New insights can be gained from combining master data from different sources and applying them to the transactional data that is now in one place.
For example the customer information within the CRM and credit-rating systems can now be made available to the debtor data.
• Turning data into actions.With a solid platform to work from, you now transform data into information that can be
acted upon by combining targets and responsibilities with data from your source systems.
For example, by adding billing and collection targets to the Accounts Receivable data, perhaps loaded from a simple spreadsheet, the 3000-line aged debtor report can start to
lead to clearer actions.
• External hierarchies.DesignBi has the capability of adding hierarchies like this: Business line -> Manager -> Administrator -> Customer, maintained in one system (even a spreadsheet) to the data
store. So even if your source systems have no such structure, now you can see
the data the way you want.
For example by using the CRM responsibility hierarchy the unstructured 3000-line aged
debtor report now has not only actionable information (e.g. how much have we collected
so far this month vs. how much did we target to collect?), but it’s now possible to see
who is responsible for collecting what.
• Just too late.The delays inherent in the traditional reports production cycle (Run operational report -> Combine, summarize etc…-> Distribute) often leads to reports being run long after the information they contain can be acted upon.
• Much too late.For ad hoc reports the delays can be even worse, especially where the user must commission IT professionals to extract the data
How DesignBi helps you know, and know now
• Always up-to-date.Automating the extraction and translation of data means that DesignBi reports are always as up-to-date as possible.
• Visualization.DesignBi dashboards and Analyzer reports open as summaries and allow users to start with a “helicopter” view of the organization and drill down to the detail if they need it. By using OLAP technology that excels at summarizing data according to “dimensions” you are not constrained simply because the summary views mask large volumes of supporting data.
• Ease of use.Most users master our Analyzer reports within minutes. Yet they are powerful enough to
allow users to drill, slice-and-dice the data to find the information they need. Without calling on IT departments to help.
• Reports that are always on.Our dashboard and Analyzer reports are web-based and are just a click away.
• Create report and then distribute it to the recipients.
The new way
• Click and it’s there on your computer.
• Any number of users.
Gone are the constraints we talked about above in having large numbers of users running queries and reports against your data.
• Better information, delivered quicker, to a wider audience means better decision-making
and a more agile business.
• Breaking the report production bottlenecks means being able to re-deploy staff from producing reports to more valuable work, and less IT support to answer complex queries.
• DesignBi is a complete business intelligence package designed for rapid deployment at a modest price.
Finally, back to the 3000-line aged debtor report example: now working with the data instead of the report, we have added an external responsibility CRM hierarchy to give the data structure, made information from the risk system available, added target billing and
collection information and made the information available from desktops anywhere with
users able to drill down to the detail.
In short, we have transformed data into information that can be acted upon.