Business Intelligence 101

Randy Archambault
Manager Business Intelligence
and Reporting
Palm Beach Tan

Components of Success
Oracle
SSRS
Business Objects
Webfocus
WebfocusObjects
Business

Business Intelligence 101

Business Intelligence (BI) is

What is
Business
Intelligence

about getting the right

information, to the right
decision makers, at the right
time.
BI is an enterprise-wide
platform that supports
reporting, analysis and
decision making.
BI leads to:
fact-based decision making
single version of the truth

Business Intelligence 101

Making useful, actionable insight from

What is
Business
Intelligence

stored data.
Allows effective business decisions to
be made.
The act of using historical data to gain
new information.
Techniques include:
multidimensional analyses
mathematical projection
modeling
ad-hoc queries
'canned' reporting
Dashboards

Questions BI is Designed to Answer

Data

ERP

What happened?
What is happening?
Why did it happen?
What will happen?
What do I want to happen?

CRM

SCM

3Pty

Past
Present
Future

Black
books
5

Questions BI is Designed to Answer

A BI solution, with the right data and

features, should be able to take operational

data and enable users to answer specific
questions such as:
Sales and marketing
Which customers should I target?
What has caused the change in my pipeline?
Which are my most profitable campaigns per region?
Did store sales spike when we advertised in the local
paper or launched an email campaign?
What is the most profitable source of sales leads and
how has that changed over time?

Questions BI is Designed to Answer

Operational
Which vendors are best at delivering on time and on budget? How

many additional personnel do we need to add per store during the

holidays?
Which order processing processes are most inefficient?
Financial
What is the fully loaded cost of new products?
What is the expected annual profit/loss based on current marketing

and sales forecasts?

How are forecasts trending against the annual plan?
What are the current trends in cash flow, accounts payable and
accounts receivable and how do they compare with plan?
Overall business performance
What are the most important risk factors impacting the companys

ability to meet annual profit goals?

Should we expand internationally and, if so, which geographic areas
should we first target?

Business Intelligence Vision

Improving organizations by
providing business insights
to all employees leading to
better, faster, more
relevant decisions
Advanced Analytics
Self Service Reporting
End-User Analysis
Business Performance Management
Operational Applications
Embedded Analytics
8

Examples of BI

IBM Model

1958

Examples of BI

Microsoft BI Platform

10

Business Intelligence Users

Executives : Information is summarized and has been

4 Types of
Users

defined for them. Users have the ability to view static

information online and/or print to a local printer.
Casual Users
Casual users require the next level of detail from the
information that is provided to viewers. In addition to
the privileges of a viewer, casual users have the ability
to refresh report information and the ability to enter
desired information parameters for the purposes of
performing high-level research and analysis.
Functional Users
Functional users need to perform detailed research and
analysis, which requires access to transactional data. In
addition to the privileges of a casual user, functional
users have the ability to develop their own ad hoc
queries and perform OLAP analysis.
Super Users
Super users have a strong understanding of both the
business and technology to access and analyze
transactional data. They have full privileges to explore
and analyze the data with the BI applications available
to them.

Business Intelligence 101

Garbage in Garbage Out
Transform data in to actionable

insight.

Information Access Strategies

The Five Stages of BI

BI involves five stages of taking raw data and
presenting it as relevant, actionable insight to
users.

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

1.The Data: defining which data will be

loaded into the system and analyzed.

Where all information is stored
Technology dependent
MSSQL, MYSQL, Oracle, Red Brick, DB2
Often an OLAP type data source

Many rows of often summarized data

Utilize database queries to retrieve data from

the source.
SQL MSSQL and MYSQL
PL/SQL Oracle

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

OLTP
Online Transaction processing
Typically not your reporting database.
Processes transactions fast for application
Example
Retail POS system
Web Site

Online Transaction Processing has two key benefits:

Simplicity
efficiency

OLAP
Online Analytical Processing
Used for reporting
May form base of data warehouse or BI tools
Not used for transaction processing.
Databases configured for OLAP use a multidimensional data model, allowing

for complex analytical and ad-hoc queries with a rapid execution time

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

2.The ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) Engine: moving

the source data to the Data Warehouse.

This can be a complex step involving modifications and

calculations on the data itself.

If this step doesnt work properly, the BI solution simply
cannot be effective.
3.Data Warehousing:
connects electronic data from different operational systems

so that the data can be queried and analyzed over time for
business decision making.
A data warehouse is an analytically oriented, integrated,
time-variant, and nonvolatile collection of data that supports
decision making processes
Large databases that aggregate data collected from multiple
sources

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

4.Analytic Engine:
analyzes multidimensional data sets found in a data

warehouse to identify trends, outliers, and patterns.

Data Mining
is the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is

becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into

information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices,
such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific
discovery.
Data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data but is often
carried out only on samples of data. The mining process will be
ineffective if the samples are not a good representation of the larger
body of data.
Data mining cannot discover patterns that may be present in the
larger body of data if those patterns are not present in the sample
being "mined".

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

5.Presentation Layer:
the dashboards, reports and alerts that

present findings from the analysis.

Typically Technology Agnostic
The presentation layer is for the user.
It does not care
How?
When ?
Where?
Why?
the user accesses the Information just that it is

available.

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

5.Presentation Layer:
Interactive Dashboards:
A dashboard is a set of high-level reports on key metrics, typically
for managers.
There may be multiple reports on a single dashboard, much the
same way that a cars dashboard has multiple gauges and displays
on it.
With a dashboard, users can gain an at-a-glance understanding of
key trends and metrics. Dashboards can be customizable to work
for anyone in an organization, from a sales rep or frontline
operations manager to a middle manager or senior executive.
An interactive dashboard allows users to take those dashboard
reports and filter information to more deeply analyze trends and
results, or to drill down into deeper and more detailed analysis of
the data.
That is, by clicking on the particular reports or results, they can
explore more detailed information to find root causes of results.

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

5.Presentation Layer:
Customizable Reports:
which can present high-level findings as well as
enable a user to drill down to find specific details.
Most BI systems either come with report templates
and/or provide the capability to create and
customize reports.
Alerts:
notifying users to changes selected as key to

meeting user goals. Alerts can be set to warn users

on an imminent event, changes to data, or that new
data needs to be entered into the system.

The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence

Microstrategy
Cognos
Oracle OBIEE
Microsoft SQL BI Suite
SAP Business Objects
Pentaho Open Source Alternative

A Retail Example
Palm Beach Tan Online Reporting Portal

Franchise Performance
Report
Store
ALA

Store

New
Customers

Tans

New Efts

Up Sell %

Revenue

PTA

PRA

Mystic PRA

1,436

70

53

75.70%

$8,933

$6.22

$2.22

$0.45

1,479

75

51

68%

$8,011

$5.42

$2.26

$0.40

1,824

82

65

79.30%

$10,312

$5.65

$1.98

$0.89

1,925

106

66

62.30%

$10,223

$5.31

$1.50

$0.36

522

33

29

87.90%

$3,793

$7.27

$2.03

$0.68

1,144

52

57

109.60%

$7,868

$6.88

$2.18

$0.34

3,447

102

73

71.60%

$12,261

$3.56

$1.74

$0.26

1,434

73

38

52.10%

$7,746

$5.40

$2.15

$0.95

Daily Snapshot
12 pm, 3 pm, 6 pm and 9 pm
Daily Snapshot

TOTALTANS
Store Rev
PTA
Retail Rev
PRA

7,340
$40,851.80
$5.57
$18,561.02
$2.53

Behind The Scenes

A Retail Example

Data Mining Example in use

Product Decision Matrix
Customer Cancelation Prediction Engine

Early EFT Cancelation

EFT Geographic Demographic Process.
Revenue Per Bed
DSS vs Data Mining

Conclusion
Business Intelligence solutions make it

possible for groups within organizations to

gain actionable insight from business data,
and to leverage these insights to meet
critical goals.
Business intelligence solutions offer
business-focused analysis at a scale,
complexity, and speed that is not
achievable with basic operational systems
reporting or spreadsheet analysis, thereby
delivering significant value.

QUESTIONS