Business intelligence (BI) is knowledge, and the value of knowledge lies in how quickly and accurately it can be applied to a business problem. The Indian industry in particular is experiencing tre­men­dous growth, and enterprises are growing either organically or are expanding their customer base through mergers and acquisi­tions. In this highly competitive market, organiza­tions need to address business challenges of managing growth, profitability, providing superior customer service and adhering to regulatory compliance, BI has a great potential to address all these challenges.

BI technologies and solutions have become imperative for the efficient functioning of any organization, as they provide timely and accurate information required by decision makers across enterprise for strategic business decisions. As the Indian market continues to grow and compete both at local and global levels, there is a need for organizations to innovate and stay competitive. To fuel innovation within the organi­zation, it becomes necessary to have a sound enterprise intelli­gence strategy in place. Embracing the right BI platform will give Indian organizations the much-required competitive advantage for further streng­thening their market position.

BI reverses the 80:20 rule because data extraction, cleaning, consolidation and report generation takes mere 20 percent of the time and rest can be utilized for analyzing, identifying new opportunities and decision-making. BI also provides single view of enterprise-wide data and helps organizations bring different, relevant data together. It helps organizations analyze the performance of the businesses across different geographies, formats and departments.

BI allows deriving analytics from different sources of data, which can be structured, unstructured, internal or external data. It aids fact-based assessment and decision makers need not depend on their gut feeling/instinct but can take fact-based decisions. This reduces the risk of failure and provides support with relevant data.

BI aids fact-based assessment and decision makers need not depend on their gut feeling

BI helps get the right information from right people at the right time. Its feature like alerts, report bursting, scheduled e-mails and other personalized settings help users monitor and take timely actions. In addition, BI also helps compare historical data, growth assessment and make better predictions while helping to establish standards and methodologies in the organization. It provides a secure and seamless sharing of information between an organization and its stakeholders, across the entire value chain. BI costs include cost of licensing, development, deployment, operation, support and enhancement. The value received from BI deployment includes time saving, increased productivity and avoidance of costly mistakes that can quickly add up to millions a year.

Businesses today have become extremely competitive and organizations are looking at ways to increase profits and reduce costs, and one of the ways of doing this is by empowering people to make informed decisions. Companies have invested in transaction systems by virtue of which they have collected vast amounts of data related to customers, suppliers, sales, marketing and employees. BI applications enable companies to access this information and turn that knowledge into profit. In the new economy, BI has moved from a good-to-have to a must-have category.

How BI helps
According to Ashit Panjwani, Director-Marketing, SAS, “Most organizations continue to face the pressures of constantly changing market demands, increasing regulatory require­ments, fiercer competition, sluggish economies and the need to do more with less. These business realities have led many organizations across verticals to adopt BI applications to gain greater insights from the data generated by their operational and transactional systems. BI enables enterprises to attain a higher level of understanding and establish a culture of fact-based decision making.”

He added that companies are looking at BI as a process of transforming organizational information into actionable intelligence that can fuel innovation and help them succeed in today's competitive environment. Adding further he said, “Right deployment of BI solutions will not only help organizations to understand various hindsight and foresight information, but also provide predictive analysis and help them in gaining critical foresight capabilities like 'what can happen or what best can happen' which is a great differentiating factor in today's environment.”

Panjwani also believes that operational systems across organizations have matured over the years. “The key differentiator would be how quickly these organizations can derive intelligence from their data residing across multiple points in their enterprise and reduce 'time to intelligence' and therefore 'time to market'. With competition growing by the day, it is imperative for any organization irrespective of size, to leapfrog ahead of others for which they need to take intelligent business decisions,” he added.

Agreeing with him, Atul Jalan, CEO and MD, Manthan Systems said, “BI empowers employees at all levels-operational, tactical and strategic-to make timely and effective decisions.” According to him, “BI helps organizations to monitor the current health of their business by providing information on sales, margin and other such key performance indicators across various products and regions; supports day-to-day tactical and operational decision making requirements to maximize their execution and leverage maximum profitability; helps organizations react faster to market opportunities whether strategic or tactical in nature by providing visibility into product trends, changing customer preferences, supply perfor­mance, and external influences like seasonal events and changing lifestyles; helps organizations develop better plans; and allocate the right budgets and resources to execute the plan with maximum effectiveness to help businesses understand their customers' buying patterns and preferences better. This helps to serve customers with better products and services, create loyalty for brands, cross sell and up sell products and solutions, and derive greater value from customers over a period of time.

Sharing his thoughts on the issue, Sanjay Deshmukh, Country Head-India and SAARC, Business Objects said, ”The prime drive for BI users is the gain they realize by having a single coherent view of data across the organization. With the nature of tools available today, users can easily perform their own analysis, create ad hoc reports and track KPIs/metrics to essentially support every business decision with the information available. As the interactions between organiza­tions and their customers/suppliers evolve, having a common view of data has become a necessity.”

Using BI solutions
Usage of BI within Indian organizations varies from organization to organization depending on their industry type and maturity of their IT infrastructure. The deployment scenario varies from just pure play query and reporting to areas where BI is being deployed for strategic decision making. It's important that organizations view BI as not just a 'query and reporting' tool but as a strategic initiative which works for data integration, intelligence storage, analytics and finally BI.

BFSI, manufacturing, telecom and pharmaceuticals are the verticals where the transactional and operational systems are already in place and usage of BI allows them to address their business challenges. With all organizations within these verticals having these systems lined up, it becomes imperative for them to go in for a solution that gives that differentiator and the competitive advantage. BI and analytics play the most important role by helping these organizations to do just that.

With the right BI infras­tructure, telecom companies can understand customer churn and take proactive measures to capture the same. Similarly, manufacturing organizations can deploy BI for reducing their warranty claims, increasing accuracy of their demand forecasting. For BFSI customers, BI can help in adhering to regulatory compliances like BASEL II and KYC, and also help them in their marketing campaign management and to cross sell and up sell.

There is also great interest from other verticals like retail and government for adopting BI to increase their compe­­titiveness and transparency.

According to an article in The Economic Times, India is the fastest growing BI market in APAC posting a growth of 35.6 percent as compared to a growth of 16 percent in APAC.

In India, there is also traction in both large enterprises as well as SMB's who are investing in BI solutions. The retail sector is catching up with large corporate entering this space to improve purchasing, forecasting, and distribution management, optimize product profitability, dramatically increase effecti­veness, and reduce marketing campaign costs and identify customers to enable retention strategies. Even SMB's in the BPO, logistics, IT/ITeS and gems and jewelry sectors are investing heavily in BI.

Challenges in adoption
A large number of Indian mid-size organizations from various verticals are competing at a global scale. Embracing the right BI strategy will give them the competitive advantage for further strengthening their market position.

BI solutions are not yet widespread in India therefore the vendors are educating the market about benefits of BI as a manageable, scalable and sustainable platform for serving the various needs of organi­zations emphasizing on the need for a managed system, as manual processes are not scalable these days.

The major challenges of implementing BI in India is that Indian market still needs to mature and transactional systems are not yet in place. Additionally, most organizations have low awareness about the benefits of BI. Industry-specific BI solutions and analytic applications are also lacking.

Enterprises still rely on gut feelings and past experiences while making decisions, and are not comfortable with the democratization of information and the transparency that BI initiatives bring about. Getting employees and executives to use BI infrastructure is an exercise and often leads to under-utilization of the BI infrastructure and lesser growth opportunities. Companies do not realize that the cost of deploying BI applications can be offset against the substantial cost savings and increased revenue that are gained using intelligence derived from the applications. The problems are more for SMB's as they do not have large IT teams.

How BI vendors help
BI should take an organization's intelligence operations to a new level, placing intelligence into the hands of the broadest possible user population throughout an organization more efficiently and at a lower cost. Organizations will increasingly demand industry-specific solutions that will suggest specific and customized solutions as a part of enterprise-wide organizational intelligence strategy.

“At SAS, our focus is on understanding the challenges and needs of organizations across industries, and work with them to jointly address these challenges and make them more competitive,” said Panjawani. “Alliances and channels are key cornerstone of our business strategy as they play significant role in delivering value to our customers. Indian SMB market is witnessing huge growth and offers significant opportunity to strengthen our leadership position. Our channel strategy will significantly increase SAS' market penetration in India by authorizing our partners to resell BI software in the market.”

Manthan Systems reaches its customers through direct sales offices and channel partners across all major geographies including UK, Europe, North America, APAC and Middle East. “Our partner firms provide key system integration and consultation services‚ driven by the retail segment. Our partners bring with them the benefits of strong retail capabilities and experience along with a close understanding of local business practices. Their familiarity with the local retail environment‚ given their location‚ act as an important additional benefits for ensuring a successful enterprise-wide BI rollout and support,” indicated Jalan.

Manthan also has strategic partnerships with comple­mentary solution providers for database and hardware. Companies like Teradata, IBM, Netezza, Microsoft, SAP, HP and Oracle are key Manthan partners with whom they jointly address specific market opportunities.

Meanwhile, Business Objects has worked with premium educational institutions to increase awareness among the student community and runs various marketing programs such as events and account-based workshops to reach out to the target audience and demonstrate the value of deploying BI solutions within their organizations.

“Business Objects has always been a partner-oriented com­pany and believes in imparting maximum knowledge to its channel partners. We currently have three types of partners-the large system integrators, OEMs, solution providers. We also have a distributor and a number of resellers who focus on the Crystal range of products. To ensure optimum skill sets within
our partners and resellers, we conduct multi-level certified training programs for our partners. We have a compre­hensive partner program in place which allows the partners to access information though demos and white papers,” said Deshmukh.

Subbalakshmi BM
subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in

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