2012 Readers' Choice: Business Intelligence

SAP and Microsoft held their positions in 2012 as the most prevalent business intelligence (BI) platforms. Microsoft rounds out the top three. Brad Hairston, vice president, Consumer Products Industry Practice, Hitachi Consulting, gives a fresh take on today’s BI market and its challenges.

 

Hairston: SAP seems to have made the most headway in winning existing ERP customers over to its BI platform. Meanwhile, Oracle has maintained a presence at most CG companies, as its performance management and OLAP capabilities tend to be preferred by finance departments. Microsoft is often used for departmental BI solutions and is starting to become more pervasive where SharePoint is used as a strategic collaboration platform.

Hairston: There are several:

BI Strategy: Before making a BI platform decision or consolidating BI tools, it’s still a great idea to take a holistic look at enterprise BI needs and define a roadmap that addresses all key dimensions — strategy, process, metrics, data, applications, architecture and people.
 

User Interface Simplification: This is less about mobility and more about usability. People want to interact with their data in an iPad manner (simplistic/intuitive/graphical/no training required). This is everything that typical BI tools are not. People are worn out on learning new complex tools. They want to consume information in their jobs the same way they do in their personal lives.
 

Data Foundation: Many companies have finally figured out that their BI tools are only as good as the data beneath them. Thus, you have more activity than ever around master data management, data governance, data quality, data attribution, etc. 
 

Demand Signal Repository: Very few CG companies are investing in BI solutions that aren’t connected in some way to a DSR. Downstream data enables companies to tackle numerous supply chain issues, and this data will continue to scale rapidly. To address this and other “big data” challenges, technology vendors are thinking about their offerings differently and making major investments.
 

“With SAS, we’re able to accomplish our goal of right flavor, right time, right store. It’s hard to put a price tag on it, but it is really invaluable in terms of running the business effectively and better serving the customer.’’ 

— Geoff Fisher, Director of Demand and Supply Planning, Nestle DSD

 

“SAP Business ByDesign gives me the real-time information that is vital to running the business day to day, while maintaining our profitability and staying on track.”  

— Eric Brown, Chief Executive Officer, Johnson Products Company