14 December 2009

Business Intelligence: The Key to Business Success

From my experiences as a Microsoft Access developer over the years working for many different type industries, I have often seen that businesses may have business tools that are utilized to provide business intelligence, however many times these tools are not encompassing all the data. They often times are not setup to display and provide other aspects of information that can be tied into the data they are conducting analysis on. This in turn is a disadvantage to the company as they are not seeing the whole picture and basing their key business decisions on partial data.

When I perform Access development work for these companies and tell the senior managers of my findings, they are often surprised because they figured that the corporate-wide ERP system, which they had just paid one hundred thousand dollars or more for would provide them everything they need. ERP systems are very beneficial for most companies and provide significant cost savings, however many times they come with canned reports based on the specifications provided by the company and inevitably new segments of data will need to be analyzed down the road, which will not be part of the original ERP system.

A well designed Business Intelligence solution will extract data sets of all needed data and consolidate it into a centralized location such as Microsoft Access. The benefit of having the data extracted to a relational database such as Microsoft Access is that the data can be logically tied together. It can also be queried and the user specific filtering results can be displayed in Excel charts, graphs, and pivot tables, Word, PDFs, Outlook e-mail attachments etc. As a consultant performing custom data services for many different business types, Microsoft Access has been my tool of choice because of these benefits, also the fact that it ties in perfectly with the world's most popular business software suite (Microsoft Office) makes it the preferred tool hands down.

Many times businesses have an idea of what they need to analyze but do not know what would be needed or the exact details of all the data they would need. Experienced Access developers with industry experience many times know the business side and can assist companies in defining the exact requirements that they will need in order to perform effective analysis. An experienced Access development programmer will be able to answer all questions that a company may have and work hand in hand with company staff to achieve a highly-effective business intelligence tool that will benefit the company immensely.

An effective business intelligence system will provide your company with the exact facts and figures you need to pinpoint critical aspects of your business. From my experience as a consultant over the years and performing most of the business intelligence solutions through Microsoft Access development, I have found that the benefits that these tools provide a company far outweigh the cost that it is to implement an effective business intelligence tool. As I had said in my experiences from designing hundreds of business solutions, hiring experienced Access developers to design the solution through Microsoft Access is in my opinion the best path to take.

One of the key ingredients for any businesses' success is its ability to have in-depth knowledge of the company. This entails such factors as customers, products, employees, sales etc. Having this information in an organized and efficient manner will provide a company with all the information that it needs in order to make key business decisions.

About the Author

Dan H is the owner of Data Gopher Custom Access Databases. He has designed custom Microsoft Access data solutions for many Fortune 500 companies and is considered to be an authority on developing custom data solutions for businesses.

Source: Business Intelligence BI Application Software articles at goarticles.com


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