The goal of operational BI is to deliver meaningful data that will help managers and front-line workers work smarter. The best uses of operational BI give employees the information they need right now to fix a problem or exploit an opportunity.
Here are some examples of how companies are using operational BI:
Casual Male Retail Group: To compete more effectively in a changing retail market, Casual Male needed a better way to plan inventory, understand customer buying behavior, and track the results of catalog mailings. According to reports in industry publications including Search Data Management and DM News, the retailer's legacy analytical systems were too slow in providing the insight its planning team needed. A new operational BI system let the company move from analysis based on "spreadsheets and guessing" to forecasting based on on-demand reports that can automate communications with store managers. The results have been higher sales and improved gross margins.
Eastern Mountain Sports: An outdoor specialty retailer, Eastern Mountain Sports needed to improve visibility into merchandising operations for a wide range of users. A case study published by Information Builders notes that the retailer sought to create a data mart using point-of-sale and legacy information, and then pull that information into a central merchandising dashboard that would be visible to authorized users across the organization. These capabilities would be extended to external suppliers through dynamic reporting options. As a result of this operational BI initiative, decision makers can quickly access key indicators such as sales, inventory and margin levels, and even drill down to analyze specific transactions. This has helped increase sales, allocate resources propagate best practices.
What's in a name?
Although more and more organizations are using real-time data to improve operations, most don't call it operational BI.
A February 2007 survey of more than 400 corporate IT professionals by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) found that 53 percent supported applications that "deliver information and insights to a broad range of users within hours or minutes for the purpose of managing or optimizing operational or time-sensitive business processes," which is TDWI's definition of operational BI. But only 13 percent of the respondents used the term operational BI.
The most commonly used term for this activity was operational reporting (31 percent). Other terms included near-real-time BI (13 percent), real-time BI (11 percent), active data warehousing (10 percent), business-critical analytics (8 percent) and right-time analysis (5 percent).
The key may not be the name but the action a business takes. By understanding some of the real-world uses of operational BI, your company may be in a better position to see how it can benefit your operations.
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