In yesterday’s Sunday Business Post Computers in the Business supplement Morgan Browne, Managing Director IIS, was featured providing insight and highlighting the availability and importance of business intelligence solutions for SMEs.
Below is the article, written by Ian Campbell.
When SAP acquired Crystal Reports as part of its takeover of Business Objects, it incorporated the BI product into Business One, its management system for small firms. Now you can not only it as a standalone product – it will integrate with any database – you can use it to leverage your SAP ERP system.
This is the latest chapter in SAP’s bid to scale down enterprise class software and make it available to SMEs. Adding BI and analytics emphasises how far this strategy has come, but are no-nonsense business owners going to be persuaded to spend money on another layer of software?
“They are getting there,” – said Morgan Browne, managing director of Intelligent Information Systems (IIS), an SAP partner in Ireland. “They understand process and they understand that they need a solution to manage their process. They always have – that’s why they have investing in accounting packages and increasingly in ERP solutions.”
He said that BI was only starting to gather momentum.
Mid-size firms are a business community that has traditionally made do with occasional reports, but it is slowly waking up to the idea of having ad hoc intelligence that they can drill down into on a regular basis.
“It’s the 80-20 rule,” said Browne. “Businesses have to look at how they are making the bulk of their money and where they should be focusing their efforts. You can only get that type of clarity from decent reporting.”
But there is still an education job to be done, according to Browne. “We meet people on a regular basis that take two to three days to gather reports for board meetings. That is time spent preparing data when they should be analysing it. Until they start to realise that they are never going to make the step up.”
Some industries need less persuading that others. Manufacturing has been quite progressive, unsurprisingly perhaps as it’s the sector that defined ERP. But Browne said that BI had a place in business when times were tough.
“As margins get tighter you have to analyse your numbers more closely. With Crystal you get interactive dashboards and ad hoc tolls for building on-the-fly analysis that give you a visibility of your business you badly need.”