Importance Of Dashboards And Olap In Business Intelligence

Ensuring profitability for your business isn’t just about providing good quality products and services anymore. It isn’t just about keeping an eye out for good opportunities either. Business today is about CREATING opportunities and cashing in on them in the most profitable and effective manner possible. Its about knowing where you are standing right now, knowing where you want your business to reach and mapping out an exact route to get there. And after all the planning and forecasting is done, it is about sticking to the strategy and moving towards that profitability level that you desire with every step adhering to the planned formula. Numbers, numbers, numbers.. More and more data and more meaning to be extracted from each set of information.. All this is made possible with business intelligence.

Information is everything in today’s corporate world. The slightest change in variables can actually create a world of a difference in an enterprise’s plans for the future. Business intelligence creates that window of opportunity in which professionals can understand all the factors affecting the business in a certain scenario and the take informed decisions to manage the situation in the most profitable manner possible.

State of the art technology is now available at the tips of industry professionals for facilitating their BI needs. In fact, specialist business intelligence tools can be used and customised for the specific requirements of a particular company. The idea is simple –making it expeditious and easy for company managements to cash into business opportunities. Some of the most common BI tools are Dashboards and OLAP. If you are new to these two terms, read this article to understand what they are all about.

Dashboards

Dashboards are an easily read, real-time interface, which provides a snapshot of the current status of key business processes as a chart or graph. The best part about these tools is their capability to facilitate informed and instantaneous decisions. The user can define the key variables that he thinks are the most important for his strategizing requirements. The system will then ensure that the data flowing from these key variables will always be present in front of the user in the meaningful format possible to help in fast paced decision making. Dashboards and their effective usage can be viewed in any organisation where speedy influx of data and its processing is an intricate function. Stock markets, brokers, traffic regulation authorities and the like depend on Dashboards for their day to day operations.

OLAP

OLAP or Online Analytical Processing systems help users to interactively analyze multidimensional data from multiple perspectives. Data mining and its rational reporting is made possible with high end OLAP solutions. Key analytical operations performed by these tools are- consolidation, drill-down and slice 'n' dice. The system is capable of aggregating data from various business facets and then analysing it as per the needs of different analytical dimensions to help managers interpret it in a comprehensive manner. They are commonly seen in large scale business organisations where data generated is generally huge in terms of volume.

If you wish to understand more about business intelligence tools be sure to visit Beyondintelligence.org.

About The Author

Phillip Jones is an expert in business intelligence and information processing models. His articles are a great source of information for enterprise owners looking to streamline their communication and information flow channels. His recommendation is to anyone looking for BI software is BeyondIntelligence.org.