How BI Is Helping Mid-Size Organizations BI, also referred to as “decision support,” allows organizations to better understand, analyze, and even predict what’s occurring in their company. BI helps your organization turn data into useful and meaningful information and then distribute this information to those that need it, when they need it—so that they can make timely and better-informed decisions. It allows organizations to combine data from a wide variety of sources and see an integrated, up-to-date, and 360-degree view.

This is especially important for medium-size companies, who—while not having the vast resources of industry giants—are typically able to more quickly implement business decisions. BI provides a win-win solution for IT and business users by allowing the IT department to be more productive in working with its business users to service special requests—while permitting these business users to become more self-sufficient. Operations and analysis are two sides of the business, and BI allows IT to be a valued partner in both.

BI can be used by a mid-size organization to:
	Determine the inventory level of a product or part• Identify its best selling products, and see if this holds true in all of its retail outlets
	Identify customers that are cutting back on their purchases so that special inducements can be offered to retain them
	Implement dashboards and scorecards so that executives and supervisors can quickly recognize operational exceptions, or when expenses are likely to exceed budget
	Establish and monitor performance metrics and take corrective actions if they are in danger of not being met
	Compare departmental turnover to identify potential morale problems
	Compare year-to-date sales for this year with last year’s, and forecast what sales are likely to be for the entire year
	Track customer orders and desired ship dates against finished goods inventory, and adjust the manufacturing production cycle and supply chain logistics to reduce inventory carrying costs
	Provide business users with the ability to perform their own ad hoc analysis, without having to tie up scarce IT resources
	Be better able to understand and analyze their own operations and their interactions with their customer, in order to gain a competitive edge over their competitors.
	Align daily operations with strategic objectives and quickly recognize when they are not in agreement.