CRM SYSTEMS

CRM Buyer > CRM Systems September 15, 2005 02:00:25 PM PDT

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Adopting Business Intelligence

By Anil Prabha The New Straits Times 06/28/05 5:00 AM PT

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"We see an explosion of data volume as enterprises are acquiring more systems to better manage their business processes. BI is gaining importance recently due to the needs of corporations to access a company's performance," says Raymond Yap, commercial and SMB director, customer solutions group, HP Malaysia.

The last two decades have seen IT spending grow significantly in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) space with the emancipation of disparate, proprietary enterprise resource management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM), and Web-based systems for dayto-day operations. Nonetheless, data integration and the eventual extraction of data to provide a holistic overview of the business remains a core concern in the ever-evolving enterprise of today. Business intelligence (BI) is indeed a cornerstone of any enterprise worth its salt, and vendors such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) , HP and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) are among the front runners in this marketplace.

Making Better Decisions Felicia Fong, IBM Malaysia's information management manager, heads the BI movement and she defines it as a means of accessing data, analyzing it and taking advantage of the insight gained to make better informed decisions. "BI solutions are changing as dynamically as the industry itself. With rapid advancements in technology and the intense pressure as a result of globalization, Malaysian SMEs have to constantly innovate to keep up-to-date with their competitors," Fong says. She stresses that effective customer relationship processes and the organization of such processes through the employment of technology will then permit local companies to own and manage the end-to-end customer experience. This in turn inevitably translates into greater profitability in the long term. IBM Malaysia's BI strategy thus is about developing solutions with local systems integrators -- IBM provides the BI software platform while the systems integrators customize the software to fit the requirements of the organization -- to empower local SMEs to comb through vast quantities of data quickly, thoroughly and with sharp analytical precision. However, she adds that the scope of BI architecture has expanded beyond traditional core warehousing disciplines such as data extract, transform and load (ETL) and reporting. IBM DB2 Universal Database has been moving steadily down a path of supporting BI functions inside the

database. These BI capabilities include data mining , online analytical processing (OLAP), spatial and advanced statistical and analytical functions for regression, co-variance, sampling, ranking, moving windows and much more -- true BI functionality in all senses of the term. The Answer Is in the Data Raymond Yap, commercial and SMB director, customer solutions group, HP Malaysia, also stresses the importance of BI in the overall context of an up and coming enterprise. In a business world of today, there often seems to be an infinite supply of data. "We see an explosion of data volume as enterprises are acquiring more systems to better manage their business processes. BI is gaining importance recently due to the needs of corporations to access a company's performance," Yap says. He adds that HP's offerings in BI places a data warehouse or datamart at the heart. "Our BI experts help our customers create a data warehouse to extract and cleanse data, and then create the analytics necessary to deliver information that gives real advantage on the competition," Yap says. to

HP partners with top application vendors like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , Oracle and SAP (NYSE: SAP) offer BI solutions in data warehousing , E.piphany (Nasdaq: EPNY) Analytical CRM and Semiconview Solutions.

A data warehouse aggregates diverse sources of information, and when coupled with the appropriate analysis tools, yields insights into corporate operations and the needs and behavior of customers. E.piphany is an established leader in campaign management and real-time marketing analytics. HP's E.piphany Analytical CRM Solution is for customer profiling and behavior analysis, campaign planning and result measurements. Meanwhile, the Semiconview is an integrated FAB analysis and reporting solution that is easy to use and can be quickly implemented for the semiconductor industry. Yap says that the local SME market is largely still testing the waters as far as enterprise applications are concerned -- thus solutions like ERP Malaysian SMEs. Know More About Your Business Mary Lee, applications sales director, Oracle Malaysia, also touts the offerings of its company in the BI arena. Oracle Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) is one of the key components of Oracle E-Business Suite to provide the integrated business management foundation sought by today's small and mid-size businesses. The DBI also allows organizations to know more about their businesses on a daily basis through a pre-built management reporting, which does not require a separate data warehouse or reporting infrastructure; resulting in dramatically faster implementations and reduced operating costs. It provides up-to-date information on business performance for key performance indicators such as revenue, expenses and profit margin. Instead of implementing a separate data warehouse and moving data from the online transaction processing (OLTP) system to a separate data warehouse, Oracle DBI summarizes the transaction data in place. , CRM and supply chain are at an early adoption stage across many

As a result, organizations have access to both summary data and transaction details in real-time from a single system and that is a key differentiator for Oracle DBI. Traditional BI solutions move a subset of the OLTP data into a separate database to support offline analysis. Typically these systems are built from scratch and require additional software, hardware, personnel, and time. With Oracle Daily Business Intelligence, users have access to more complete and up-to-date information, while at the same time reducing the amount of custom development and the number of systems needed to support the solution. In terms of the marketplace, Lee believes that businesses are undergoing a fundamental shift in the way they make decisions. Today decision-making is no longer just a top management activity. Important decisions are made at all levels of an organization. "The key to better decision-making requires delivering the right information to the right person at the right time," she says.
2005 The New Straits Times. All rights reserved. 2005 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.

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