Effective online business intelligence software can enable companies to have a comprehensive knowledge of the issues affecting the company such as production, sales, and internal operations.

This software solution can then enable the company management to take proper actions. It is vital for any management application to have the capability to extract and present data in a meaningful way.

Simply put, business intelligence empowers the company to make faster and better decisions by offering the right information to all the right people, at the proper time. Normally, many employees find that they are suffering from information overload and require solutions that offer the analysis to make decisions effectively.

Reporting solutions and templates offer tools that enable employees to make informed decisions to be part of their natural and everyday work experience, whether they are dealing with strategic, operational or a tactical level.

Multi-Dimensional Data Warehouse

The core of any business intelligence solution is the multi-dimensional data warehouse. In simple terms, this huge database, which contains all the data a company needs for performance management. The techniques of modeling that experts use to build this database are crucial to the function of the business intelligence solution. Normally, this data warehouse has time-invariant data, integrated data, and atomic data.

Time variant data means that the company tracks and records changes to data to produce reports overtime that show the changes. Integrated data means that the database has data from all or most of the operational applications of the company and that the data is consistent. Non-volatile data means that the company never overwrites or deletes data in the database, once the data is committed it is read-only and static and is retained for future reference.

Source Systems

Source systems are not exactly part of the business intelligence solution but they feed it. Hence, they should be the basis of any architecture of a business intelligence solution. When setting up the BI solution, it is vital that you consider all the kinds of data you require in your analysis. You need to consider the information contained in databases as well as that in external data feeds.