Is your management intelligence able to withstand boardroom pressure?

Do you often find yourself in a position where you just don’t have the data or data quality that you need to quickly make informed business decisions? Can you interrogate your data in real time to explain issues and is it delivered in a time and format applicable to your needs?

In a recent survey, De Villiers Walton identified these areas as the most prominent cause for concern for CFOs and Senior Management in their roles, even following significant investment in business intelligence systems. With in-depth analysis, the causes of these BI inadequacies can be most commonly attributed to the following:

1. Inadequate system architecture - leading to lack of responsiveness and often an overload of the wrong data into queries and generally low performance
2. User ability and mentality - users are not educated to make best use of existing BI functionality, or perceive that data sets are incomplete, resulting in manual trawling for data
3. Inaccurate and untimely data – user tendency to pull data from a central repository and manipulate it manually leading to the data currency being out of synch and the loss of “one version of the truth”
4. Inadequate System and data integration with non SAP systems

De Villiers Walton recognizing the wastage and resultant inaccuracy of data from these common pitfalls, have developed their “Intelligent BI” category of services to address these challenges and provide a quick, cost effective and dependable answer to your business intelligence needs.

With an overall objective to bring BI back to it’s core, Intelligent BI services focus on cutting out the cost of users manually manipulating data and focus on the reporting capability of the core data set, bringing it back to “one version of the truth”.

The Intelligent BI category of services is a blend of our core, strategic and solution specific services. During an initial assessment workshop with key project and business stakeholders, our consultants diagnose which group of services will best address your specific issues. The resultant services executed could consist of one or a combination of the following:

BI strategy review 

• Identification of your business driven KPIs
• Proposal for the source of data to feed those KPIs

Independent Programme Review

• Programme and project background review

Critical pain identification

• Identification of the key human/technical and software issues

Visualisation of Management Information

Identification of best format

Usage Review

• Identification of who is using the system and what their needs are

Investigation into cost of usage

• Review of reporting factories/silos
• System performance review

BI Solution review (including technical review)

• Quality review
• Compliance review
• Governance review

Exact recommendations and output will be dependent on your particular business need and circumstance, but are likely to include the following:

• An outline of the most strategic KPI’s to drive the business and how to feed them
• A transparent view of how IT supports the Management Intelligence (MI) strategy
• Development of an action plan to increase performance
• Identification and elimination of obsolete practices, reports and usage

Key Benefits

Our customers, which include leading global companies in the Consumer goods, Hi-tech and Pharmaceutical arena, have benefitted considerably in a very short space of time from De Villiers Walton’s Intelligent BI program.  Typically you should expect to realise up to 80% of the expected benefits by executing just the top two or three recommended tasks outlined in the solution roadmap.

Overall you will benefit from:

• Enhanced data quality
• More intelligent and active utilisation
• Data timeliness
• Increased data transparency
• Enhanced and more sophisticated usage