Data Consolidations with BIO Business Intelligence
BIO business intelligence provides insight by giving you access to your data through dashboards, ad hoc analysis, and ad hoc and pre-configured reporting. By consolidating the data from disparate systems, organizations can eliminate individual information silos and provide consistent information across functional areas, business segments, and levels within that organization. Integrating the data within BIO allows you to compare data housed in separate systems to find trends, causes, correlations, and interrelationships that would not be possible using data in any of the individual systems alone.
Combine Data from Disparate Systems
Using BIO, we’ve integrated ERP data with CRM data and data from many other applications including time clock, operations, manufacturing, and retail solutions. When combined with BIO’s built-in content—such as pre-defined reports, folder structures, naming conventions, calculations, hierarchies, and relationships—BIO users get an extremely valuable view of their data that would be difficult at best to obtain by other means. Many companies try to consolidate the data themselves, using Excel, for example. But do-it-yourself solutions can compound the problems, turning highly paid business professionals into data gatherers who spend a lot of time cleaning and massaging data and reconciling results.
There are lots of reasons to consolidate data. Data from different reporting entities may reside in different databases. Different departments may have specialized data like T&E data or commissions data or purchasing information. You may need to combine transactional data with your forecasted data or operational data and R&D estimates. Whatever the source, BIO gives you the tools you need to uncover the knowledge in your consolidated data that you need to make decisions that impact your bottom line.
Know the Issues before You Begin
BIO business intelligence allows you to combine the data from different Microsoft Dynamics databases as well as from all kinds of other databases within your organization and beyond. But combining data is more than just taking two or more databases and joining them together. There are a number of considerations that need to be taken into account before, during, and after data consolidations. Here are some of the major items to consider:
- Quality and condition of the data before consolidation
- Common terminology across the databases and in the consolidated database
- Common data formats
- Hierarchies in the combining and combined databases
- Unique identifiers for each record to identify related records in the combining databases
- Automating the consolidation processes for regular updates
- How changes to the sources databases will be handled
- How changes to the consolidated database will be handled
- How accounting and reporting changes will be handled
- Local versus centralized data and control
- Error handling
- How security for the source databases will be transferred to the consolidated database
BIO has facilities built into the software that can assist you in resolving these issues. Further, BIO consultants have done numerous data consolidations and have dealt with all of these issues before. Their experience will ensure that your data consolidations will result in complete and accurate consolidated data for dashboards, reporting, and analysis.
To Sum It Up
Using BIO to consolidate the data from multiple systems can make a world of difference for an organization, streamlining reporting and analysis and increasing productivity. Adding BIO’s deep connectors and rich value-added content to your consolidated data will give you and edge over your competition. In no time, even your non-technical folks will be analyzing consolidated data without a thought as to where the source data resides or how to compare the apples in your ERP system to the oranges in your CRM system.