Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

Finding the focus of your business and monitoring your success in that particular area is the key to success in today’s diverse market. You can monitor how well your company is maintaining strategic focus by defining your Key Performance Indicators and investing in a business intelligence software program that will help you keep track of your progress. Your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, can show you which areas you’re executing well and which need improvement.

Choosing Your KPIs

Depending on your business’ focus, your KPIs will be different. Once you narrow down which KPIs are important to your business you can set up your business intelligence software to start collecting the necessary data you need to keep track of your strategy.

· Cost-focused Businesses – The KPIs for cost-focused businesses include cost measurement, cycle time, ability to conform to market standards, quantity, and quality.

· Product-focused Businesses – You’ll be looking at new products in the pipeline, research and development, time to market, and product customization when you select your KPIs for a product-focused business.

· Customer-focused Businesses – Your KPIs will be knowledge of customers, environmental appearance, complaint management, employee empathy, product expertise, and responsiveness in a customer-focused business.

A cost-focused business might benefit from having some knowledge of its customers, but it is not an important KPI for the company overall, while the opposite is true for a customer-focused business. You can mix and match these KPIs if you find it necessary, but most of the time this categorization will hold true.

Setting Up Your Business Intelligence Software

Armed with KPIs specific to your business, you can set up your business intelligence software to collect the data that will show whether or not you are on track with your company strategy. For cost-focused businesses, you will need to collect data that shows cost for the entire process, from materials to labor. Product-focused businesses will need to collect data that shows how the company is moving forward with new products and customer-focused businesses will have to collect more information on customer satisfaction. This will require the business intelligence program to mine different data sources, depending on the information required.

It may even be useful for you to determine your KPIs before you purchase your business intelligence software. That way, you’ll be able to purchase the best package for your data tracking requirements knowing what you need to collect.

Data problems can severely affect the quality of your business intelligence analysis, but they are often hard to detect. Because they don’t stop your analysis process right away, they can slowly become more and more of a detriment until they finally destroy your BI project. Because of how destructive unreliable data can be, one of the most important things you can do to ensure that your business intelligence software runs correctly is to make sure that your data is easily accessible and accurate. If you have duplicate or incomplete information, you will end up with results and eventually initiatives that are baseless. If you use the information to reach out to your customers for marketing campaigns or up-selling opportunities, you run the risk of looking disorganized and incompetent.

You can fix your data problems by following these basic steps:

• Detect and correct potential issues before they do any damage. Before adding any raw data to your business intelligence software applications, use reconnaissance software tools to determine the quality and reliability of your new data. This software is usually more accurate than checking the data manually and can detect and correct mistakes before they get lost in your existing data.
• Eliminate duplicates and standardize all your data as it comes in. This will give you a more comprehensive view of what kind of data you are actually collecting from the get go. By establishing procedures for data processing as it comes in, you can standardize the data as it enters the system.
• Make sure that any new data that applies to and affects old data can be categorized with the older data to create a more complete information history on a specific topic, be it customer buying habits or updating ROI.
• Set up a data “dictionary” so that data from separate sources with different phrases that share the same meaning are identified as belonging to the same category. For example, “manager” and “mgr” are spelled differently, but share the same meaning and should be treated as such.
• Use the tools available to you to automatically extract data from different sources, interpret it, and transform it into a form that can be used by your business intelligence software. This will save you the time and money required to translate your data manually.

Once you know your data is in the right format and contains information that can be used successfully by your software, you can concentrate on the results of your business intelligence analysis and how they affect your company. Take a second look at how reliable your data is now, before the wrong information affects your investment in your BI program.

Companies large and small can benefit from a well thought out business intelligence strategy, but developing that strategy can sometimes be more challenging than implementing a business intelligence program.  To make sure that your company is getting the most out of your BI program, make sure that you define your goals and have a plan for the information you generate before you start collecting and analyzing data. 

First Steps

Assess your current system of data collection.  How you collect your data will make a difference in how complete your information is, which will in turn affect the results of your business intelligence program.   Make sure that if you need historical data on your company or customers that you know where it is and how to access it.  You’ll also need to take some time to understand your business needs and make a rough road map for how you would like your business to transform.  Focus your attention on a few operational objective that can be achieved both short and long term.

Planning Your Strategy

Start with your vision of where you would like your company to be in 3 to 5 years.  Pick specific goals that can be achieved with the assistance of a good business intelligence program.  These goals should have measurable success rates or key performance indicators.  You will use your key performance indicators (KPIs) as milestones for how close you are to accomplishing your goals.  You can then set up your information infrastructure to collect the necessary data that can be analyzed and turned into information, which can be used to make effective decisions for your company. 

In order to pick the most worthwhile goals, you must understand what the desired end result is.  You will have to ask yourself what you will do with the business intelligence information your program generates once you have it.  Otherwise, you will have a vast amount of information and no way to strategize around it.  In companies without a comprehensive long-term plan, decision makers react to the information they get from their data without understanding the far-reaching consequences of their actions. 

Another important thing to think about before you implement your program is what your options are once you have the information.  Often companies have an idea of how they want to move forward and are looking to the business intelligence information generated by their BI program to support their current strategy.  They soon learn that the information is not always in line with their current plan.  Brainstorm all possible outcomes of your business intelligence program and think of ways that your company can improve based on the different results.  You probably won’t be able to come up with every single possibility, but you will be prepared to think creatively when your BI program starts to generate useful information.

Lastly, remember why you are implementing this program.  Business intelligence can be a huge asset to your business, but if you focus on the data and not on what the data can do for your company, your energy is misplaced.  Before you become overwhelmed with data warehousing and data integration initiatives, take a step back and refocus on your company’s goals.

If your Discoverer reports are not returning data in R12 then here are the steps

R12 uses new Security Policies and for Receivables, it uses Views starting with ARFG
Please follow the following steps :
1. Create a new responsibility with Accounts Payables/ Accounts Receivables as Application. (skip this if you already have custom responsibilities)
2. Set the profile options necessary for AP / AR like MO: Operating Unit ,MO: Security Profile
3. Do the necessary setup required for GL like segment rules and profile options
4. Set the system profile option: ‘Initialization SQL Statement – Custom’ for the responsibility to value
‘Begin GL_SECURITY_PKG.init(); end;’ .
5. Login to Receivables responsibility and you will get discoverer data for AP, AR and GL.