Business Intelligence is Easier and More Valuable

A recent article on WebCPA.com titled, BI – Not Just for IT Pro’s Anymore – quoted Axis on the benefits of BI as a profit tool.  The article stated that “BI is becoming an understandable, usable and affordable initiative for small to midsized businesses.” It went on to define BI, “Advertisement

At its most basic level, business intelligence provides historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of BI technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.” 

Manny Buigas, Principal at Axis, was quoted as saying, “”People are looking at their companies differently because of the economy, and the big fear to overcome is costs. These days you have to produce more with less people. When we create a data warehouse for a client, it’s fresh every day. It’s not hours and hours or waiting for reports to export to a spreadsheet.” 

“A strong selling point of BI is that you can visualize your operations right away. Show [clients] a business intelligence tool and they are asking questions you never thought of, making connections from one system to another,” said Buigas. “When we embedded BI into clients’ CRM systems, they were blown away. A sales guy is now looking at his clients very differently.” 

The article concluded, and we agree that, “Businesses are ripe for BI work because the accounting and CRM systems they already have contain the data they need to see how their businesses can be improved, though it may still involve a bit of consulting work from a VAR.  Right now there are a ton of integrated accounting solutions out there and you get something that sits on top of that to pull out the data that’s in there intelligibly, not just report on it but interpret it and make recommendations. That’s real value.”