De Villiers Walton is a software consultancy specialising in SAP BI and CRM projects, often called in to identify and fix performance issues with SAP’s Business Warehouse BI application at large private companies.

The company’s founder and joint managing director, Daneel De Villiers, says many companies are not making the best of the BI tools they have installed because they are poorly designed and do not deliver information in a format that matches the individual business need.

“It is a classic case of oversell. The client is not sure of what they want,” he said, adding that the reason people are not using BI is that the requirement was for information across the entire business, but it only delivered data from one part of the business.

“There is a lack of data quality, which means companies are not getting the data they want, and utilisation and ROI are not what they should be,” added De Villiers Walton BI solutions architect Ian James. “If you put in a BI system costing £3m, you do not want three people using it.”