How BI Works

How BI works.

Business intelligence (BI) delivers on a simple promise: improved business performance by delivering better decision-making throughout your entire organization. When you know that your insight into corporate data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust every decision you make. With that level of confidence securely in hand, you can improve business performance, create competitive advantage, and achieve corporate objectives. BI helps deliver trusted and confident decision-making through three key steps:

Step 1: Quality Data. Give your users a way of finding the data they need in an easy-to-understand format that helps them make decisions. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can help you improve your data process. SQL Server 2005 offers an enterprise-ready and proven relational engine that can store huge amounts of data, support high query loads, high performance, and clustering, and scale to the largest enterprise needs.

Step 2: Tools to gain deeper insights. Provide your end users with the resources that help them make accurate and confident decisions. One of the tools that many people already use, understand, and trust is Microsoft Office Excel. With the 2007 release, Microsoft has made a huge investment in your ability to analyze, visualize, and gain insight into data.
Step 3: Decisions aligned with corporate goals. The first two steps help individual employees make individual decisions. The next step helps improve corporate-level decision making all across your organization. Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 makes this possible by providing informational views that consolidate all your corporate data-from sales to HR and operations to finance. Decision making now has a greater context that captures the workings of your entire company.

More about PerformancePoint and its relationship with Microsoft Dynamics.

It’s important that information workers have a way of understanding what’s going on in the business in practical terms that are actionable. The transaction level detail from an ERP system doesn’t really help understand what’s going on. People think in terms of, “Should we sell more of this product? Should we go into this new sales territory? Should we open that store? Should we hire some more sales reps? Should we consider another supplier?” These are questions that are actionable, and BI software should help people think about these questions and take action. That’s where Performance Point can help; it allows people to get a higher level business focus on their information.

The Microsoft Dynamics team has worked closely with the Microsoft Performance Point team during the planning and development of Performance Point. The Microsoft Dynamics roadmap includes plans to take advantage of and integrate with Performance Point by tailoring it for the specific needs of Microsoft Dynamics customers, including specific efforts to ensure that the functionality and capabilities found in present BI solutions are integrated with and available as part of Performance Point.

Built on SQL Server 2005 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System, Office Performance Point Server 2007 helps make BI better in three key ways:

• PerformancePoint Monitoring brings to market the next evolution of Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager 2005. Define and use scorecards, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to help drive accountability and alignment across your organization.
• PerformancePoint Analytics is the next version of ProClarity Analytics and helps you easily analyze and identify trends, opportunities, and threats in your data. Capture and share that information throughout your organization.
• PerformancePoint Planning offers a new set of capabilities released with Office Performance Point Server 2007 and will help simplify business planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

The Result.

Individuals have access to better quality data. They can make better decisions and can trust that their decisions are aligned with corporate goals. BI supports business environments from small to enterprise. It grows as you grow, and it’s a small investment for a large return on trust that can help you build your business.