Why small enterprises need business intelligence?

By: Ashok Jade, CIO, Shalimar Paints

BI is commonly viewed by enterprises as a complicated and time and money consuming IT system, which needs a lot of IT efforts and skills to develop and maintain. At the same time, the second side of the coin is that every CEO and CxO spells it as a ‘must have’ tool in the organization.

Single version of truth, critical business insights, and decision making support tool are the key factors driving the heightened interest in BI. Although large enterprises have taken the lead in undertaking BI initiatives, small enterprises are also realizing its importance. Let’s look at how small enterprises can benefit with BI implementation.

BI ADVANTAGE FOR SMEs

Risk of being rendered irrelevant by faster competition or being swallowed by a larger company is a cause of concern for every SME. To stay ahead of the competition, CEOs need to take rapid decisions. It is obvious that BI implementation in this circumstance is very critical. BI system with reporting, dashboards, and self-serviced data exploration allows to better understand business along with better visibility and insights on data.

It helps to convert data from sales, financial, marketing, and manufacturing in some meaningful information. This information can then be fed to managers of different functions

so that they take informed decisions. BI gives quick insights to small enterprises on what is working and what is not working. It helps to predict impact on business in the near future and long term. Any negative impact can be predicted earlier, this will be of great advantage especially in case of small enterprises as

their capability to sustain losses is low. BI gives one version of data point and truth from top to bottom. So corporate team does not need to worry about decision making capabilities of their managers down the line.

However, the BI implementation strategy in small enterprises must be in phases. System and process maturity in SME is usually low, so small enterprises must avoid a big bang approach. Implementation in phases will also help to keep the budget in check and ensure that enterprises move from one phase to another phase only after success.

Small Enterprises must take a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach for BI implementation. Initially, SMEs should implement BI only for simple operational reports and summary dashboards. Once phase I is successful, SMEs can then can move to operational dashboards and ad-hoc query and some more complicated analysis. This way implementation will be more successful and mistakes of the earlier phase can be corrected in the next phase.

ENSURING SUCCESSFUL BI IMPLEMENTATION

As a first step, the top management and IT both must agree that BI implementation needs careful efforts and thought. They need to articulate the project scope carefully and should not try to absorb everything in phase I. Especially top management should not think limited scope in phase I is a waste of money. BI needs long term strategy—it is not a project which gives immediate results.

Next important factor is solution selection by IT. Small enterprises must be extra careful while the selection of tool. IT in this case should not only consider cost and timelines of first phase, it must also consider future needs as well. Cost, time, features, infra, and skilled resources availability in the market must be taken into consideration.

Make sure the solution can work on the latest technologies like cloud, virtualization, mobile, social media, etc. Further, licensing norms should be reviewed carefully. Most BI products have very complex licensing policy— they have various norms like licenses for connectors, multiple applications access, virtualization, CPU bases licenses so on. Ignoring these facts may become a bottleneck in future for BI expansion in the organization.

Implementation partner selection is another important factor. Partner must be experienced and should have skilled resources. His market reputation should be excellent as he is the single entity who is going to develop your entire BI strategy. In summary, BI implementation in small enterprises is very essential. A well-thought and executed BI implementation can provide a competitive edge to small enterprises.