Two, why BI will be hot
Recently, the business intelligence software market is booming, for the downturn in the IT industry to bring a beam of light. According to the Forrester Research Center (Forrester Research) survey found that at the end of last year, 44% of enterprises said that they plan to buy BI software this year. In addition, according to data provided by IDC, within five years, the business intelligence market size will expand from the current $5.5 billion to $15.7 billion. It is to see the BI market's huge "money", some IT service providers have launched their own BI software, such as Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, domestic companies such as the Golden Disk are vigorously develop and promote BI software. At the same time, some commercial enterprises, manufacturing enterprises are also actively applying BI software to provide valuable services for their decision-making. Enterprises are keen on BI, first of all, from the advantages of BI itself: First, catering to the needs of enterprises. According to the latest issue of the U.S. "Fortune" magazine's analysis, BI can calculate a large amount of information, and then for the enterprise to find out the market trends, operational problems, as well as to find new opportunities in the market. And this is exactly what enterprises have been looking for in the software. The world's retail industry giant Wal-Mart, through the analysis of customer purchase information, found that the beer and diapers placed in a similar area of sales, both sales will be greatly increased, so the merchandise display in accordance with the layout of the placement of goods, to promote sales. This "beer and diapers" story, in fact, is Wal-Mart's use of BI to analyze the results. Another example is a food company found last spring, customers complained about the cherry flavor ice cream explosion, they think that the ice cream within the cherry content is too little. So the company used BI software to identify the source of the problem: The photo on the ice cream box reflected ice cream with more cherries, creating a misunderstanding among customers. After the company replaced the photo, the complaint stopped. Second, the decision-making support provided by the enterprise is obvious, BI is based on the analysis of the first-hand information of the enterprise, and thus the decision-making effect on the enterprise is obvious. For example, the U.S. Red Robin burger chain purchased a set of BI software for the enterprise to track the results of marketing activities, and monitor the sales of burgers in each branch. As a result, Red Robin soon realized it was wasting too much money on a white sauce that no one was actually eating. So Red Robin decided to develop its own sauce and stop buying it from outside. Thirdly, it allows all employees to analyze the information themselves, so that they can identify problems. This is the original some decision support software does not have the function. All along, only the information or statistics staff know how to in piles of information and data, output a thick stack of business reports, through meetings or briefings to share with everyone. Now with BI is different, it can make everyone has the ability to conduct business analysis alone. Generally, BI software categorizes huge amounts of information so that relevant information is clustered together, such as financials under finance and inventory under inventory. When you need specific information, you can use BI software to search for the information you need. For example, the U.S. staple company's vice president of finance in the use of BI software within a year, the company found a long time in the display planning mistakes made. Through the adjustment, five years since, the company's net profit has been growing at a rate of 12%. Fourth, the price of BI software is not too high compared to ERP, CRM, etc., and it takes only a few weeks to install and go live. Enterprises are now more keen on BI another major reason is that data collection, data mining has provided a good foundation for BI, the rise in demand for BI. Has been a lot of industry information technology are focused on the front-end data collection, with the continuous development of enterprise information technology, enterprises have accumulated a large amount of business data, enterprise personnel at all levels want to be able to quickly and efficiently from these large amounts of cluttered data to obtain meaningful information, decision makers want to be able to use the existing data to guide business decision-making and enhance the competitive advantage of the enterprise, this demand has driven the development of data warehouses. At the same time, there is a growing realization that everyday business applications generate large amounts of data that can bring significant added value when used for decision support. The benefits of these processes can be further enhanced when external data such as industry analysis reports, independent market surveys, evaluation results and consultant assessments are added to the mix. Therefore, business intelligence in recent years has gradually become a hotspot can be said to be the development of information technology to a certain extent of the inevitable. BI is based on the data warehouse, by the data warehouse to summarize this information for the application of BI to provide support.
Three, the common application of BI
For the application of BI, almost every enterprise needs, but large-scale market analysis is mainly concentrated in the highly competitive consumer goods industry and retail and financial services, such as banking, insurance and so on. The use of BI in this industry can immediately drive sales. This may be most obvious in the retail industry, such as the Beijing Yansha Wangjing Shopping Center after the use of BI results. The company's use of IBM's BI system developed by the customer analysis system, for timely adjustment of product categories and price positioning, adjustment and monitoring of the supplier's business behavior, timely replenishment of orders and overall business positioning to provide a scientific basis for the application of BI is not only so, but also can be applied to the following aspects: 1, customer relationship management. Although the definition of CRM is different for each company, but the CRM can help companies identify, attract and retain valuable customers, the industry has **** knowledge. An enterprise to understand the customer, the shortcut to influence the customer is through continuous access to customer-related information, the use of BI applications for customer segmentation, customer behavior analysis, key customers and potential customers to understand the customer, and then provide customers with personalized service and cross-selling, thereby improving customer satisfaction and persistence, for the enterprise to win market opportunities. 2、Profitability analysis. For an enterprise, expanding market share and growing profits are its main goals. Which product contributes the most to the total profit? Which branch for the enterprise to bring better earnings? What kind of distribution channel is better? To answer these types of questions ordinary analytical methods may yield answers; but the more in-depth questions are why is this the case? And how can the business be expanded? How can the combination of products bring more revenue? These are modern business development needs to seriously consider the issue, and only BI systems may help solve. 3, reduce costs. Business Intelligence can easily achieve multiple data sources, non-consistent data and a variety of different users of data access and analysis needs, to achieve a true enterprise-level report production, distribution and reprocessing, reduce IS costs. 4, Others. In fact, the application of business intelligence is very broad, but also for you to solve problems such as: riskiness analysis, credit rating and so on.