Business Intelligence 101

Randy Archambault
Manager Business Intelligence
and Reporting
Palm Beach Tan
Components of Success
• SSRS • 11 Years
• Webfocus
• Oracle
• Business Objects

Platforms Experience

Industries Education

• Hospitality • EMIS at
• Insurance SMU
• Retail
Business Intelligence 101
What is  Business Intelligence (BI) is about
Business
Intelligence 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

What is  Making useful, actionable insight from

Business stored data.
Intelligence  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

• What happened? Past

• What is happening?
• Why did it happen? Present
• What will happen?
• What do I want to happen? Future

Data Black
ERP CRM SCM 3Pty 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 company’s 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

4 Types of Users been 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

Adhoc

Data Standard
Mining Reports

Exception
Olap and
Based
Drilldown
Reports
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 doesn’t 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 car’s 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
New
Store Store Tans Customers New Efts Up Sell % Revenue PTA PRA Mystic PRA

ALA 1 1,436 70 53 75.70% $8,933 $6.22 $2.22 $0.45

2 1,479 75 51 68% $8,011 $5.42 $2.26 $0.40

3 1,824 82 65 79.30% $10,312 $5.65 $1.98 $0.89

4 1,925 106 66 62.30% $10,223 $5.31 $1.50 $0.36

5 522 33 29 87.90% $3,793 $7.27 $2.03 $0.68

6 1,144 52 57 109.60% $7,868 $6.88 $2.18 $0.34

7 3,447 102 73 71.60% $12,261 $3.56 $1.74 $0.26

8 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 7,340

Store Rev $40,851.80

PTA $5.57

Retail Rev $18,561.02

PRA $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