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Business intelligence solutions promise to enable your organization to make effective business decisions using data-driven analytics. But of the hundreds of BI tools on the market, is your current enterprise BI tool the right fit for your organization’s needs?
Most likely not. Every day our team talks with end users who experience trouble trying to create the analytics they need using existing enterprise BI tools like OBIEE. Users struggle with the complexity of report building to get the output they require. Reports that should take minutes to build instead take weeks. The results: frustration and delayed time to insight.
It doesn’t have to be this way. BI applications should make reports and dashboards fast and easy to build with minimal reliance on IT. Your BI tool should make it simple for different users to gain the insights they need from the same report. For example, when looking at HCM data, one user might want to learn what the average salary is per business unit while another wants to see the average number of leaves employees take.
End users should be able to perform simple functions like adding a column to a report, creating a custom calculation or applying conditional formatting to columns. If most end users require technical support to create an ad hoc report on your operational data, that’s a sign that your BI tool is slowing you down.
The wrong BI software can also slow down your IT team. Many BI tools claim to be pre-packaged: to work with minimal effort required for integration with your enterprise ERP. However, in most cases, that is wishful thinking. There is usually significant groundwork that has to be handled before you can use the product, such as setting up user roles and migrating data. For example, ERP data should be secured based on user roles within their application, with the single sign-on for a seamless experience. User management, role management and data security setups should be leveraged from the existing ERP application, so no duplicate effort from IT is needed when adding new users or roles.
Finally, most organizations need to connect to and report from a plethora of data sources ranging from cloud offerings like Oracle Fusion to ERPs like Oracle E-Business Suite and NetSuite, databases like Teradata, and much more. Your BI solution should provide integrators and database connectors for these data sources right out of the box. You should also have access to live reporting from your database without the need to export elsewhere for analysis. And your developers should be able to develop their data marts as they see fit.
If you’re currently using an enterprise BI tool that isn’t able to meet these requirements, it’s likely that it is hindering your ability to deliver self-service reporting that meets the needs of your end users and the IT teams that support them. Your reporting tool should be flexible enough to do all this. Business needs are already complicated, your enterprise BI tool shouldn’t add even more complexity to your organization’s operations.
Orbit Analytics provides operational reporting and analytics for over 70,000 business users worldwide. Request a demo today to see our BI reporting tool in action!
