Business Intelligence

Transforming information into actionable business insight.

AgilityWorks offer best-in-class consulting support for organisations wishing to maximise the value achieved from their Business Intelligence (BI) investment.

BI is a fundamental building block for holistic, accurate and timely reporting. Significant investment has gone into transactional ERP systems, however, often the business still feels they lack the necessary business insight to make informed decisions in a timely fashion. Historically BI solutions have grown up through departmental silos as tactical responses to immediate information needs; however, the greatest value can be achieved through an enterprise approach to business intelligence.

Organisations are at varying degrees of BI maturity. For many organisations they are solely focused on historical BI reporting (against vast process data) but for many high-performing companies, the BI needs already include:

  • Expanded enterprise coverage (not just executive and management reporting)
  • Forward looking BI (as opposed to historical BI)
  • Improved support for information workers through self-service capabilities to simplify and streamline daily work
  • Query capabilities to include search on structured & unstructured data
  • Business-centric interactive visualisation tools
  • Enterprise-wide data quality

AgilityWorks lead our clients through the delivery of BI solutions within complex business environments and deliver these solutions with the resultant business agility in mind. We apply class-leading technology and actively invest in skills development to ensure our consultants have market leading insight and experience. Our consultants have developed world-class BI solutions for organisations across all major sectors with exceptional experience across Retail, CP, Utilities and Public Sector.

Because a picture paints a thousand words

Industry-specific, role-based dashboards

AgilityWorks offer a comprehensive portfolio of visualisation and dashboarding services. We focus on the business metrics that are relevant to the business audience before assessing how best to present the information in a dashboard. Our business led approach ensures our clients focus on the way that the business user is going to use the information.

Function-relevant dashboards

As well as delivering customer-specific dashboard solutions, AgilityWorks offer a broad suite of pre-defined function-relevant dashboards to accelerate project delivery. Function-specific dashboards enable departments to achieve rapid value from BI investment.

Process-embedded analytics

Information delivery is all-to-often considered as a technical consideration that provides reporting output from delivered processes (sometimes lumped in with interaces and forms under the RICEFW banner). To maximise the value from BI investment broader business-centric considerations need to be taken into account including:

  • the types of information that will enable the business to be more effective and efficient
  • where the users are based when they need to access the information
  • the level of interaction that the user needs to get to the result
  • the process outcomes that need to result from the information available

Based on years of experience in the delivery of information solutions, AgilityWorks have developed and refined value-driven BI models that take into account organisational, process and technological considerations to transform the way in which business users make use of information and insight.

Volume meets performance

The face of data warehousing is changing rapidly. In the past data warehousing predominantly focused on extracting and transforming large volumes of operational data into structures that had been modeled and optimised for reporting. One of the most common complaints of traditional data warehouses is performance. Traditional OLAP tools rely on IT administrators to predict the way the users will interact with the data warehouse and optimise performance through pre-caching commonly used reports and indexing based on common or pre-determined navigation paths.

In-memory processing is a game-changer for BI allowing high volume data sets to be accessed through highly performant structures that no longer rely on knowing what the user is querying to deliver consistent performance. This is equally important in the budgeting and forecasting arena where typically large volumes of data (e.g. last year actuals) need to be accessed as the basis of functions for the forecast year (such as a distribution of sales based on last year).

However, in-memory is not the answer to all problems and a business-centric information model that takes into consider key themes such as data lacency remains critical to deliver a suitable solution to the business community. To find out more about how we have transformed the BI capabilities of our clients, contact us.