Businesses are continuously going through the cycle of collecting data about their customers, sales trends, and marketing habits that play a critical role in their ongoing success.  Those businesses that can consolidate and leverage this information will be able to drive sales, improve marketing, and deliver great customer service and rapid information flow to clearly differentiate their value proposition.  BI drives informed decisions by:

1) Consolidating data for analysis

2) Presenting data in a consistent, easy to read fashion

3) Delivering data on a daily basis to quickly identify historical trending, KPI deviations and timing issues

4) Customizing data to the parameters needed

5) Rapidly seeing what is profitable and what is not to make better short-term decisions

Traditionally enterprise data is consolidated, analyzed, and delivered to decision makers to act on, but usually after the fact.  Businesses need to quickly identify, manage and communicate deviations to their plan to drive top tier performance. Using technology like PerformancePoint [1] in conjunction with SharePoint, information can be aggregated from multiple sources, and using consistent metrics report on overall business performance and trending, with speed and efficiency targeted to drive margin.    SharePoint integration further helps by increasing visibility to surface data via familiar company portal interfaces, reducing time and effort by providing centralized administration and workflow capabilities, as well as to provide individuals the ability to create customized scorecards, dashboards, and analytics aligning with their own responsibilities and goals and objectives.

Figure 1 – Displaying metrics on a SharePoint portal

If you are looking for more information on Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server, refer to our earlier blog [1].

 

[1] http://www.imason.com/blogs/noorez_khamis/archive/2009/03/02/microsoft-office-performance-point-server-now-free-for-customer-with-sharepoint-enterprise-cal.aspx