In the ERP system, all transactions (or at least a lot) that take place in your organization are registered. With a Business Intelligence tool, you analyze these transactions which provides you extremely valuable information. As an example I will take the service department, pre-eminently a department where deployment of BI tools can bring your organization a lot of profit.
Insight into the profitability of service
Service organizations work with different maintenance contracts, various types of service jobs in various types of machines or objects and numerous different parts. In order to determine the profitability of the service department, it is not sufficient to evaluate one or a few documents, but this requires an analysis of the complete data. This will answer many interesting questions, such as:
--> What type of maintenance contracts are the most profitable?
--> Are there parts that we have to replace very often?
--> What repairs or service jobs are carried out frequently?
--> How does the required maintenance differ per type or model?
These answers provide an insight into the profitability of the service department and help your organization to optimize maintenance contracts, service agreements and warranty conditions.
Business Intelligence for you
A good BI tool helps your service representatives to answer all their questions, and in a simple manner. Think for instance about:
- Predefined KPIs in management reports: the service manager would like to see the key figures in repetitive reports.
- Combine information from different systems: BI can be filled by different systems. If, within a holding, the sub-organizations make use of different ERP systems, then BI can be used to carry out an analysis using the data from all these underlying companies. It is even possible to provide the BI system with information from Excel sheets.
- Presentation in different ways: The BI tool should offer the flexibility to present the data in different ways to the user. Often the data is in a so-called OLAP cube, and it can be presented in a dashboard or the familiar Excel.
- Ad hoc information: A user looking for ad hoc information should not be dependent on the IT department or the BI consultant. He or she should be able to obtain the right information in a simple manner. By using cubes, the data has already been stored in the correct manner, which saves the user time and reduces the risk of misinterpretation.
René Welmerink is Application Consultant at Dysel and turns modern technology into practical and useful applications for customers.
