As aprt of their recent services restructuring SDS Vancouver is pleased to announce that they will now offer Business Intelliegnce Consulting Services for their clients. http://www.Wikipedia.com defines Business Intelliegence as follows: Business Intelligence(BI) refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting,OLAP,analytics,data mining,business performance management,benchmarking,text mining, andpredictive analytics.What does this mean for the small business? All businesses collect data of some sort. Whether it is financial information using programs such as PeachTree or Quickbooks or more specific customer oriented data such as is collected at the Point of Sale (items purchased, time, date, dollar amount, on sales, store location, etc).The purpose behind BI is to analyze the data the company [already] collects and report on it, look for trends and use it to give managers enough information to make more informed decisions about where the company has been or is going. Another application of BI is to use that information to make the company more profitable and/or more efficient. Typical reporting tools used by BI are KPIs (Key performance Indicators), Statistical Analyses, Standard Reporting, Historical Reporting and Trend Reporting to mention just a few. As an example, Amazon.com use BI and Data Warehousing (closely related to BI) to offer other books/items that might be of interest to the customer when a purchase is made. This information is based on what others, making the same purchase, have also purchased. For instance, if you were to purchase a book on BI, Amazon might display a message as you go through the check out procedure that points out that others have also purchased books on Data Warehousing, MDX and SQL Server.One of the main purposes of BI is to assist the managers and directors in making more informed and more accurrate decisions regarding how to run the business and what to offer and./or sell.
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