In assessing Napoleon’s loss at Waterloo, historians believe, that the increased size of the battlefield made it impossible for Napoleon to personally gather the information he needed, as had been his habit in previous battles. Since Napoleon was unable to retrieve such crucial information at the times in which he needed to make decisions critical to individual engagements along the line of battle, he lost the entire battle. The line of battle for decision makers today spans the world and requires the right information at the right time. Business intelligence and, more specifically, Ad-Hoc reporting provides business leaders information of the type and quality, which allows greater profitability, greater flexibility, and lower costs.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) refers to both the procedures and the infrastructure a company designs and develops to collect, store and analyze the information produced by the company’s activities within the marketplace. This data is created from internal and external activities. For example, a company will use BI to track the specifics of what it is spending in producing a widget (internal) and will track the sale and use of that widget by their customers (external). With BI, leadership within a company creates and utilizes actionable reports, follows key metrics, and reviews trends to improve more timely decision making.
After a company’s decision makers agree on the focus, scope, and timeliness of the reports they will use, the IT department designs the necessary software solutions within the company’s existing infrastructure. These reports provide sufficient information for the regularly occurring aspects of the business cycle. Like the ever-changing reality of a battlefield, an important percentage of the information businesses need, however, occurs in response to the changing dynamics of a market or a competitor’s actions, information which can be gleaned from Ad-Hoc reporting. In other words, Ad-Hoc reporting enhances business intelligence with analysis of previously-unconsidered questions.
Ad-Hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc reporting enables business leaders to create reports on the fly without the need to involve the IT Department. Producing factual reports covering changing circumstances for the purposes of planning and executing future action for specific occasions is invaluable for a business. Also, Ad-Hoc reporting can be used to analyze existing reports in ways, which may be more meaningful at a particular time. Ad-Hoc reporting is easy for the user. Its features include creating reports from scratch, displaying results in tabular detail, creating new reports using data from existing reports, and can be accessed anywhere by anyone. Company’s will see the benefits of Ad-Hoc reporting immediately, benefits such as flexibility, access to multiple sources of data, reduced workload for IT, and a streamlined decision-making process.
Today’s economic environment demands the flexibility to contract and expand internal and external business operations to profitably engage the ever-changing demands of the global marketplace. Ad-Hoc reporting gives decision makers the power to act and assess their companies’ movements with intelligent timeliness and informed decisions, power which defines leadership and profitability.