Why would a company needs a datawarehouse / business intelligence solutions? This usual question always came back to us everytime we present our BI Solutions. Well, the answer is very simple. A company will need a business intelligence solutions when they feel it is necessary to analize their Company Performance Indicator or Data Trends, and then they will use it as their Decision Support System. Business Intelligence usually described as an interactive process of analyzing and exploring structured, domain-specific information (often stored in a data warehouse) to discern trends or patterns, thereby deriving insights and drawing conclusions. Business Intelligence (BI) process includes communicating finding and effecting change. Business Intelligence domains examples are customers, products, services, period or competitors.

What are the Company Performance Indicator or Data Trends?

Company performance Indicator is a number value or ratio that can be use for measuring business activity performance and it can be used for making a decision based on it.Overall it will represents company progress towards a success. Data Trends are also a measurement over a period of time that indicates data movement or data pattern, such as sales over period of time.

What if those Company Performance Indicator or Data Trends information are generated from existing Transactional System (OLTP)? Do we still need this BI Solutions?

Some companies can not generate these information directly from their Transactional (OLTP) System because it will disturb the operational of the system. To generate these information, sometime you need to get source data for over period of time and there will be a lot of data aggregation and summarizing activities. These activities are very heavy and can result in disturbing the Transactional (OLTP) System, makes them become heavy and the transactional application becomes slow. This is the reason why we still need this BI Solutions.

How is this Datawarehouse/Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions work?

Usually the process begins by extracting source data from your Transactional (OLTP) System into a Staging Area, and then they will be transform into target Datawarehouse. These often called the Extract, Transform, Loading (ETL) Process. The final target of these process is in the form of star schemas and cubes. These objects are accessed by front end BI tools where BI users can analyze and generate BI reports.

What kind of information can be generated from Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions?

The kind of information generated from this BI Solutions depends on which modul it will derived the source data from. Below are some examples of information that can be generated from BI Solutions categorized by the System.