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While large enterprises have increasingly embraced incorporating business intelligence into their operations, smaller businesses have often been slower to embrace the practice. The reasons? Historically, adding this functionality meant additional costs for licenses and training, as well as dealing with the complexity of installing, maintaining, and incorporating yet another application into everyday activities. Today you dont need to make a significant IT investment to get a better picture of your operations.
Your business can take advantage of the Microsoft products you may already own and use to explore a business intelligence solution that fits you. Cost is no longer a barrier since you likely already have the licenses you need; and by getting more out of the tools you use every day, you make it easy for everyone to take a closer look at the data they need to make the best decisions for the business.
Throughout this paper, well follow Steve, a fictional business owner who oversees sales and operations for AdventureWorks Cycles. For the past few years, Steve has tracked sales manually as his operations have expanded. Keeping his information top of mind is important, so he writes down everything on whiteboards and in ad hoc spreadsheets. Thats a tactic that has sufficed through his start-up phase as he tries to stay on track with the day-to-day business operations. But as the company has picked up momentum over the last few years, this approach has become more difficult to manageand increasingly error-prone. No one else in the company knows the logic hes used or where hes stored the spreadsheets on his computer. If Steve goes on vacation for a week, operations could shut down because the other employees cant access his dataand even if they could, they wouldnt know how to work with it. Steve, like so many other business owners, needs to get accurate, consistent data, in as close to real time as possible, so he can have a realistic view of the state of the business and make the best decisions to keep costs low and profits high. Throughout this paper, Steve well see how he uses existing products and licenses to Owner, AdventureWorks Cycles compile and understand his data for increased business insight.
As a result, you can gain a better overall view of the business. Unprofitable product lines can be eliminated, and resources can be used more efficiently or perhaps moved to more profitable areas of the business. Your company becomes smarter, leaner, more effective, and better positioned to face challenges successfully.
Database
Thats exactly what Steve from AdventureWorks Cycles did. Steve has recently begun using standard SQL Server reports to get an accurate, consistent view of sales data for the whole company. Business operations have branched out into several regions, and each regional sales manager is keeping track of that areas performance. Steve wants to make sure he can keep each regional sales manager aware of the overall company performance, and develop a useful way for everyone to collaborate and see into the specific sales and profit margins of each region so they can collectively make better decisions across the whole organization. A basic SQL Server reporting solution helps him quickly generate and build intuitive reports, analyze data, easily create charts, and get a snapshot of information such as bank account balances, important reminders, and accounts receivable and payableall on one screen. Finally, using Microsoft Office Excel and other familiar Microsoft Office tools, Steve makes this data analysis easier and more intuitive by adding simple data visualization for quicker and more informed business decisions. With PowerPivot for Excel 2010, hes able to speedily transform very large quantities of data into meaningful information, getting the answers he needs in seconds.
Sharing Reports and Adding Richer Data Visualization When your business applications run on SQL Server, you have access to standard reports using Reporting Services and Report Builder that can give you more visibility into your data. You can easily work with and view these reports using familiar Office tools, and you can share them with others in your organization to help everyone understand business performance. Once you have set up access to the database from within Reporting Services, you can start creating, modifying, and sharing reports. Reports can be published to a central locationsuch as the Web, your SharePoint site, or another shared locationand automatically updated so you and your team can make decisions based on current information.
Taking his quest for business insight further, Steve builds and manages SQL Server reports to gather and share sales performance data with his regional managers. The SQL Server reports he creates are customizable and automated, and give him an improved view into AdventureWorks Cycles financial and business performance. Next, Steve turns the data from his business applications into actionable items by making reports available to all employees using familiar formats such as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and even the Web. He also posts the reports to the companys Microsoft SharePoint collaboration portal to keep the latest data available in a central location for anyone to access.
Holistic Reporting, Rich Scorecards, and Dashboards A more in-depth solution can take data from your existing systems and consolidate it into a single holistic view. This gives you the flexibility to run whats known as ad hoc reports which allow you to create specific, customized queries. You can also create automatically updated, intuitive scorecards that track your companys key performance indicators with rich data visualization, including embedded graphs and charts. A scorecard is an at-a-glance way for you to look at the all-up performance of your business across various criteria for your companys success. Your scorecard may include some of the following metrics: Frequency of in-person customer visits Web site visitor rates Percentage of sales on first contact Stock deliveries Number of leads Call center sales
Just as scorecards can help you see whether youre meeting specific objectives, dashboards can give you a visual display of the most important information you need to achieve one or more objectives. Dashboards display holistic business data, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so you can view information as a snapshot and drill deeper to uncover the underlying triggers for various results. These visually-based presentations of business metrics can be used to quickly inform management decision-making.
Lets take a look at Steves example once more. While his current reports are helpful for gaining perspective, hed like to combine data from various systems to more accurately map actual performance numbers to sales goals, and to display it in an easy-to-understand way. Steve also wants to give every employee access to accurate, actionable information so they can understand the key drivers for the business and make appropriate, timely decisions that support increased profits. Using familiar Microsoft products, hes able to create interactive reports and visually present the data in scorecards and dashboards that users can explore for more information. Together, Office Excel, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server enable Steve to create a solution that combines data from different business applications and data sources to create a single, holistic view of overall company operations. And he easily publishes these reports to a central location, thus helping everyone in the company access the data they need to stay focused on the business priorities.
Heres how familiar Microsoft products can help you gain more insight into your business data:
Data storage and reporting SQL Server is the foundation that fast, smart, efficient businesses are built on. Its an optimal way to store and analyze your data and run a wide variety of standard and custom reports with built-in reporting features. Sharing and collaboration As companies grow, its often difficult to keep track of the multiplying documents and their locations. SharePoint enables you to store and share all your files in a central site, manage dashboards and scorecards, and collaborate on documents and processesanytime, anywhere. Visualization and Analysis Microsoft Excel helps you visualize your data, navigate it quickly, query the most relevant information, and conduct what-if analysis so can you confidently plan the best course of action. You can do this from just a simple spreadsheet or you can build professional-looking charts and apply rich visual enhancements such as 3-D effects, soft shadowing, and transparency. PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a data analysis tool that delivers even more computational power directly within Excel. And if youre already using SharePoint, you can gain added efficiency through SharePoint-based management tools. With the full suite of Microsoft Office products you already use, you can easily and effectively create, analyze, and share reports. Build charts in Excel, share your info with SharePoint, explore richer data visualization with Microsoft Office Visio, and create reports and presentations with your findings in Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Sharing data across multiple applications is easy, so you can use the tools youre most familiar with to increase your business insight.
Moving forward, Microsoft is continuing to invest in development of new technologies like cloud-based Windows Azure and SQL Azure to help you use the Microsoft is committed to helping small and mid- products you have now to make it even easier to acsized businesses to maximize their technology ben- cess and analyze data. Azure and other cloud serefits while reducing their overall costs. One way is by vices can give your business flexibility and scale with leveraging the power of the cloud. The term cloud the ability to pay as you grow, they can reduce datahas become a bit of a buzzwordessentially it refers base procurement and management needs, and can to infrastructure that resides in and uses the simplic- enable anywhere access to key business data. Learn ity, accessibility, and flexibility of the Internet. When more at http://www.azure.com. you have your servers and applications in the cloud instead of on-premises, you can access your data from virtually anywhere, and you can save a signifi-
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