BI and its benefits

BI is a strategic and reporting tool with sets of methodologies and processes for transforming data into meaningful insights, such as sales reports, slice and dice finance reports, and predictive analysis, to support decision making.

Some of the benefits are as follows:

• Decreased query and reporting time
• Identifying and track key performance metrics against their direct competitors and the overall market
• It is fast at providing reports, performing analysis, and planning
• It helps you make better business decisions
• It directly helps to reduce costs, which leads to higher revenue for an organization

The SAP BusinessObjects BI platform provides an enterprise BI with systems that are scalable, flexible, and adaptive. They have a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows us to deploy and standardize SAP BusinessObjects BI implementations. SAP offers both a suite of reporting tools with a full spectrum of features and a new cloud solution as a so-called software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. In this book, we will discuss the traditional SAP BusinessObjects tools and the new predictive analytics tools. With SAP BI, you can get insights in the following areas:

• Data discovery: With SAP BusinessObjects you can discover, analyze, and share. It can do the following:
  • Mash up data from multiple sources
  • Create visualizations
  • Combine visualizations to tell a story
• Applications and dashboards: It enables you to build engaging experience in the following ways:
  • It allows you to create dynamic and customizable applications and dashboards
  • You can engage in sophisticated planning and predictive applications out-of-the-box
  • It's capable of delivering engaging information to users where they need it
• Reporting: You can distribute formatted information:
  • Securely distribute information across the organization
  • Create interactive reports
  • Create personalized reports via email