With all the industry hype about operational business intelligence (OBI), you might be struggling to identify exactly how this technological breakthrough can benefit your business. But at Endeavour we know exactly how powerful the benefits of OBI can be, because we’ve helped so many of our clients to take those first steps towards being operationally intelligent. So let’s shed some light on the hard business benefits delivered by the new generation of Business Intelligence solutions.
A Perfect Partnership
OBI isn’t a replacement for traditional business data analysis – it’s a valuable new addition, enriching and enhancing existing BI capabilities. So what’s the difference between the two? Well, traditional BI analyses static, stored data (new or historical) to deliver user-friendly visualisations, reports and actionable information. It’s about helping users to spot those big patterns and trends that inform strategic, long-term change and better business decisions. On the other hand, OBI is about tracking live data, spotting changes, gaps and opportunities as they happen and having the ability to react immediately. Powered by in-memory computing, OBI opens up access to live data and processes delivered on-tap – empowering people to improve efficiency and streamline process day-to-day.
Ditching the Drudgery
OBI does the grunt work of pulling and tracking live data and processes from multiple sources across your organisation. Then it uses a layer of intelligence to select and feed-through the most relevant and meaningful information according to each user’s needs – wherever and whenever they need it. With information available on-tap, you’re people will be freed up from the mind-numbing task of hunting through data on multiple screens or applications. Instead, live, relevant information can be delivered straight into their hands from a single-source, as and when they need it. So your people can always be one step-ahead, reacting and adapting to changes in real time, rather than trawling for information. With OBI, they’ll have the time, insights and resources they need to make snappy, informed decisions on the go – minimising downtime and maximising productivity across your business.
Automate As You Go
Being ‘operationally intelligent’ starts with knowing where you want to your business to go, and being able to identify the series of steps and changes you need to get there. And it’s by no means a complicated process. The first step might be as simple as setting-up a single automated detection and incident-response process, for example an automatic alert triggered as soon as a service-level failure occurs, ensuring the right person takes immediate, corrective action – and saving time, money and reputation in the long run!
That single step could be enough to generate significant benefits across your company. But if you want a system to guide your first and future steps towards automation - and to make your day-to-day work faster, easier, and more accurate- the new generation of BI solutions are primed to help. With an integrated and operationally intelligent BI system like Greentree4, information silos can be automatically removed enabling you and your people to access live data from one single (and incredibly comprehensive) source. And because Greentree4 is made up of flexible, cohesive modules - you can choose to activate what you need, when you need it, allowing you to move forward and automate at your own pace.
OBI In Practice
When your business has a system that supports OBI, the benefits can ripple out across the whole organisation, changing the way you and your people work. Take the manual process of filling in long, repetitive sales forms: that’s not a part of the task that anyone looks forward to and errors are bound to occur. But with an operationally intelligent business system, that form could be automatically populated with the right client data as soon as a member of staff types in a reference number. On the same screen, your people could also choose to pull up the customer’s sales history, to check for overdue invoices or to be alerted to standing discounts: all information that would be automatically available at the press of a button.
OBI can also help to reduce the impact of staff absences, automatically reallocating urgent work and ensuring no project or customer gets overlooked. Team members know exactly what their colleagues are working on, and what needs to happen if they’re away. And as soon as HR approves a leave application, the system is triggered to reallocate jobs to the most suitable person, notifying them of their additional job details and changing their schedule accordingly.
Day-To-Day Intelligence
Being operationally intelligent is largely about identifying which operational processes can be improved to get your business where it needs to be. And an integrated system like Greentree4 that combines the best of OBI and traditional BI, will help you do exactly that. With Greentree4 you get a single, intelligent wellspring of live and static information, a framework to help you automate systems and remove error – and the ability to free your people from dull, repetitive data tasks.
If you’re interested in learning how to make your day-to-day operations faster and simpler, get in touch with the team at Endeavour today.
