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Featured Story
The Importance of Planning and Forecasting in BI
From PARIS Technologies
The budgeting and forecasting process for most organizations is long and tedious and occurs on an annual basis, at least. Companies try to do it more often to improve accuracy and aim to ultimately implement a procedure for continuous planning, rolling forecasts, and driver-based planning.
Unlike any other business process, budgeting and forecasting is unique because it is forward thinking. Business processes like accounting, inventory tracking, invoicing, shipping, etc. are based on actual events from the past and present.
This is a fundamental difference as it also defines how the data from these processes are managed. Essentially, actual events are captured as transactions in ERPs, supply chain systems, invoicing and accounting systems, etc., and data related to it is effectively stored in its databases. On the other hand, budgets and forecasts typically reside in spreadsheets where aggregate data is entered by several people in the organization.
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What is a Dashboard?
Defining dashboards, visual analysis tools and other data presentation media. There are many different ideas of what a dashboard is. This article will clearly define it along with other presentation tools. In my article, What is BI - A Business Intelligence Primer, I...
BI for Sales: Pipeline Analysis
Although it is sometimes said that sales is an art, the reality is that sales is a process. This process requires specific skills and activities that can be measured and managed to improve a salesperson’s performance. Unfortunately, front line sales management has a...
6 Golden Rules to Successful Dashboard Design
Dashboards are often created on-the-fly with data being added simply because there is some white space not being used. Different people in the company ask for different data to be displayed and soon the dashboard becomes hard to read and full of meaningless...
Visualizing For The Color Blind
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A Very High Level Intro to Dashboards
So what exactly is a dashboard? Well, an easy answer would be to say that it’s that thing in your car, usually above the steering wheel. But we’re not talking about that kind of dashboard. We’re talking about the ones that are used in businesses; healthcare, retail,...
How to Implement Lean BI
Before delving into what Lean BI is, it is important to address what Lean BI is not. Many people hear the word “Lean” and it conjures up images of featureless tools, limited budgets, reduced development and the elimination of jobs. Dispelling those myths out of the...
Why do you need a Business Intelligence (BI) Solution?
With the amount of data stored by companies growing exponentially, it is no surprise that finding the right data management solution continues to show up on the priority list of Chief Information Officers (CIO). Data has to be secure and distributed efficiently for...
Big Data doesn’t have to be so “big” after all
In an era where having access to real-time data and analyzing data effectively can push you a step ahead of your competition, it is essential to make the big data process as simple as possible. Data gathered from transactions, to customer service functionally, price,...
How To Solve Your Budgeting and Reporting Challenges
Many companies today utilize some form of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System to integrate information across various departments such as sales, finance, manufacturing etc. PowerOLAP goes beyond the integration and makes access to instant reports and...
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Resources
Types of OLAP Systems
MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP... what's the difference? And modern OLAP for this century.
History of OLAP and BI
Learn about the history of OLAP technology with this comprehensive inforgraphic