Is Your Business Intelligence Reporting Really Solved?

Many enterprises labor under the false impression that existing business intelligence (BI) solutions give users what they need and that their BI needs are “solved.” This perception comes from low expectations around reporting and analytics, having been shaped by previous experiences and the limitations they live under today. Rather than accepting the current solution as good enough, IT professionals should look to BI solutions that deliver breakthroughs — that truly satisfy users — and deliver valuable, actionable information for business decision-making.

In many cases an organization’s reporting could best be described as “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Many people are unaware of the value that dashboards and a comprehensive, tailored BI solution can provide. Executives and business users not only need but also want a comprehensive portfolio of information to make informed business decisions.

In some organizations, users still wait days to get certain reports that they depend on. They may experience human error in the data gathering process, or they might not believe they can get data directly from a given application. Likewise, they may think they need to run two separate reports and then manually compare or cross-reference — when in fact they should get a single, combined report that pulls data directly from whatever applications are necessary. They might also have a report that is close to what they need but find it too time-consuming or expensive to get changes made because they are dependent on others to make those changes. Or they might incorrectly believe that the analytics and reporting solution that’s packaged with their application is the best one available. Many people accept what they have as the limit to what’s possible — either because they've lived with it for so long or because they tried something else and it didn’t work or introduced additional issues.

Cyberquery: Understand the data that drives your business

In many cases, these issues can be addressed by deploying a solution like Cyberquery, a fast, easy-to-use BI solution that includes dashboards, reporting, analysis, and data exploration for power users, occasional users, and IT professionals. Cyberquery delivers the fastest and most productive way to explore, analyze, and understand the data that drives your business. Highlights include:

• Quick understanding of the facts — With Cyberquery, data explorations feature instant results to understand the facts more quickly and make “speed-of-thought” analysis possible. Answers lead to more questions, and further answers lead to deep insights that facilitate decision-making with understanding and certainty.
• Ease of implementation — Using unique tools, Cyberquery provides access to existing data sources in minutes, not hours or weeks, and with no need to build data warehouses or data marts in order to get started.
• Rapid user adoption — To quickly realize the benefits of a new BI software initiative, it’s essential that speed is core to every aspect of the solution. The focus on personal productivity as well as runtime performance in Cyberquery makes the initial creation, refinement, and ownership experience unique in the BI arena. From an enhanced learning experience — due to virtually instant response that enables experimentation and exploration, to highly efficient and high-performance execution of queries — delays in data availability or decisions made without all of the data will be a thing of the past.
• Meets a broad spectrum of user needs — Unique in the reporting arena, Cyberquery is a single product that delivers ease of use, speed, and depth of accessible functionality to provide everyone — from occasional users and power users to IT professionals — to get the results they need when they need them.

Cyberquery in action: Giffin

Surface finishing company Giffin was struggling with an outdated BI solution when they found Cyberquery. The company had a project management dashboard that was created in Microsoft Excel, built on about a dozen extracts from their SyteLine manufacturing software. The SyteLine data was exported to Excel, and a number of Excel calculations created and formatted a “Projects” dashboard for company executives.

However, refreshing this dashboard was a time-consuming and error-prone process, and Giffin came to Cyberscience with the goal of automating the dashboard creation process. In the end, what Giffin created as a result of working with Cyberquery was even more valuable. In addition to the project management dashboard, they can now generate financial statements and other critical reports in real time and post these reports to their intranet. These are all unexpected benefits because users had accepted what they had as the limit of what was possible.

Giffin loves its new Cyberquery dashboards. In addition to top-line summaries, the reports offer multiple levels of drill-downs and projections. Now, users can not only see the high-level project status, they also have the ability to drill down to find the real-time, root cause for any variance in the numbers. Because the information is coming directly from SyteLine, there are no issues with behind-the-scene data manipulations or errors that might occur in Excel. With Cyberquery, Giffin receives more timely updates to their dashboards and can drill down into real-time production reports that explain the actual posting for all projects. The combination of the high-level dashboards and real-time production reports delivers a complete solution for company project managers and the executives who depend on this information.

Just like Giffin, companies should look to solutions that enable a comprehensive set of dashboards and reports to give users and executives the information they need for better decision-making — and not accept the status quo. By adopting a powerful BI solution like Cyberquery, your organization can break free from the constraints of the past and enter a new era of informed business decisions.

Want to break free from your BI limitations? Drop a line here on LinkedIn or email me directly at [email protected], and let’s get started.