Business with intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is knowledge, and the value of knowledge lies in
how quickly and accurately it can be applied to a business problem. The Indian
industry in particular is experiencing tremendous growth, and enterprises are
growing either organically or are expanding their customer base through mergers
and acquisitions. In this highly competitive market, organizations need to
address business challenges of managing growth, profitability, providing
superior customer service and adhering to regulatory compliance, BI has a great
potential to address all these challenges.

BI technologies and solutions have become imperative for the efficient
functioning of any organization, as they provide timely and accurate information
required by decision makers across enterprise for strategic business decisions.
As the Indian market continues to grow and compete both at local and global
levels, there is a need for organizations to innovate and stay competitive. To
fuel innovation within the organization, it becomes necessary to have a sound
enterprise intelligence strategy in place. Embracing the right BI platform will
give Indian organizations the much-required competitive advantage for further
strengthening their market position.

How BI helps

According to Ashit Panjwani, Director-Marketing, SAS, “Most organizations
continue to face the pressures of constantly changing market demands, increasing
regulatory requirements, fiercer competition, sluggish economies and the need to
do more with less. These business realities have led many organizations across
verticals to adopt BI applications to gain greater insights from the data
generated by their operational and transactional systems. BI enables enterprises
to attain a higher level of understanding and establish a culture of fact-based
decision making.”

He added that companies are looking at BI as a process of transforming
organizational information into actionable intelligence that can fuel innovation
and help them succeed in today's competitive environment. Adding further he
said, “Right deployment of BI solutions will not only help organizations to
understand various hindsight and foresight information, but also provide
predictive analysis and help them in gaining critical foresight capabilities
like 'what can happen or what best can happen' which is a great differentiating
factor in today's environment.”

BI aids fact-based assessment and decision makers need not depend on their gut feeling

Panjwani also believes that operational systems across organizations have
matured over the years. “The key differentiator would be how quickly these
organizations can derive intelligence from their data residing across multiple
points in their enterprise and reduce 'time to intelligence' and therefore 'time
to market'. With competition growing by the day, it is imperative for any
organization irrespective of size, to leapfrog ahead of others for which they
need to take intelligent business decisions,” he added.

Agreeing with him, Atul Jalan, CEO and MD, Manthan Systems said, “BI empowers
employees at all levels-operational, tactical and strategic-to make timely and
effective decisions.” According to him, “BI helps organizations to monitor the
current health of their business by providing information on sales, margin and
other such key performance indicators across various products and regions;
supports day-to-day tactical and operational decision making requirements to
maximize their execution and leverage maximum profitability; helps organizations
react faster to market opportunities whether strategic or tactical in nature by
providing visibility into product trends, changing customer preferences, supply
performance, and external influences like seasonal events and changing
lifestyles; helps organizations develop better plans; and allocate the right
budgets and resources to execute the plan with maximum effectiveness to help
businesses understand their customers' buying patterns and preferences better.

This helps to serve customers with better products and services, create
loyalty for brands, cross sell and up sell products and solutions, and derive
greater value from customers over a period of time.

Sharing his thoughts on the issue, Sanjay Deshmukh, Country Head-India and
SAARC, Business Objects said, ”The prime drive for BI users is the gain they
realize by having a single coherent view of data across the organization. With
the nature of tools available today, users can easily perform their own
analysis, create ad hoc reports and track KPIs/metrics to essentially support
every business decision with the information available. As the interactions
between organizations and their customers/suppliers evolve, having a common view
of data has become a necessity.”

Using BI solutions

Usage of BI within Indian organizations varies from organization to
organization depending on their industry type and maturity of their IT
infrastructure. The deployment scenario varies from just pure play query and
reporting to areas where BI is being deployed for strategic decision making.
It's important that organizations view BI as not just a 'query and reporting'
tool but as a strategic initiative which works for data integration,
intelligence storage, analytics and finally BI.

BFSI, manufacturing, telecom and pharma­ceuticals are the verticals where the
transactional and operational systems are already in place and usage of BI
allows them to address their business challenges. With all organizations within
these verticals having these systems lined up, it becomes imperative for them to
go in for a solution that gives that differentiator and the competitive
advantage. BI and analytics play the most important role by helping these
organizations to do just that. With the right BI infrastructure, telecom
companies can understand customer churn and take proactive measures to capture
the same. Similarly, manufacturing organizations can deploy BI for reducing
their warranty claims, increasing accuracy of their demand forecasting. For BFSI
customers, BI can help in adhering to regulatory compliances like BASEL II and
KYC, and also help them in their marketing campaign management and to cross sell
and up sell.

There is also great interest from other verticals like retail and government
for adopting BI to increase their competitiveness and transparency.

According to an article in The Economic Times, India is the fastest growing
BI market in APAC posting a growth of 35.6 percent as compared to a growth of 16
percent in APAC.

Challenges in adoption

A large number of Indian mid-size organizations from various verticals are
competing at a global scale. Embracing the right BI strategy will give them the
competitive advantage for further strengthening their market position.

BI solutions are not yet widespread in India therefore the vendors are
educating the market about benefits of BI as a manageable, scalable and
sustainable platform for serving the various needs of organizations emphasizing
on the need for a managed system, as manual processes are not scalable these
days.

The major challenges of implementing BI in India is that Indian market still
needs to mature and transactional systems are not yet in place. Additionally,
most organizations have low awareness about the benefits of BI.
Industry-specific BI solutions and analytic applications are also lacking.

Enterprises still rely on gut feelings and past experiences while making
decisions, and are not comfortable with the democratization of information and
the transparency that BI initiatives bring about. Getting employees and
executives to use BI infrastructure is an exercise and often leads to
under-utilization of the BI infrastructure and lesser growth opportunities.
Companies do not realize that the cost of deploying BI applications can be
offset against the substantial cost savings and increased revenue that are
gained using intelligence derived from the applications. The problems are more
for SMB's as they do not have large IT teams.

subbalakshmi bM

subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in