Business Intelligence

Most organizations continuously collect huge quantities of data, but how many are able to harness this data into information that enables them to make better business decisions?

Business Intelligence is all about making accurate and relevant information available to decision makers in real-time:

  • Which of your customers is the most profitable?
  • Which products and services are the most profitable?
  • Budget analysis
  • Financial reporting and consolidation
  • Market segment analysis
  • and much more!

Business intelligence goes beyond the production of standard management reports to providing tools that let end users explore their data themselves to find answers to their own questions with ease, or use data mining techniques to unearth exceptions and patterns hidden deep in vast collections of data. The user conducts these explorations through web browsers, or Microsoft Excel, or one of a number of graphical client tools.

OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) describes a whole class of products used for the development of Business Intelligence systems, or for the augmentation of existing systems with business intelligence capabilities.

Data warehousing is the organization and collection of data, often from disparate sources into a structure that supports the delivery of business intelligence systems, often using OLAP technologies.

How can CRA help you?

Until now, many of the tools for solving these business problems have used proprietary databases, closed architectures and have been overpriced. CRA has long been a proponent of optimized, multidimensional databases such as Microsoft Analysis Services and Applix TM1, as the ideal tools for the above applications. In particular, we see these two products together with the increasing deployment of internet and intranet technologies as a key opportunity for us to help our clients gain even better control of their data.

During the implementation of a project, we typically assist with tasks which include:

  • Needs analysis
  • Tool selection
  • Project planning
  • Software installation and configuration
  • Analysis and design (particularly multidimensional analysis)
  • User and administrator training
  • Building data feeds (including the sophisticated mapping and transformations that are often required)
  • Audit trails, exception reports and other controls
  • Help files and systems documentation
  • And of course: Ongoing support

We have found that many tasks and requirements are common across many projects. Where practical we have created, using Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications, a collection of utilities to automate these tasks. We always strive, during deployment, to employ the best software development techniques, emphasizing reusability, maintenance, efficiency and clarity. We are strong advocates of object oriented software design and we try, where possible, to use industry standard development tools.