Business Information Strategy

To gain maximum benefit from information in your corporate databases, every organisation needs to have a reporting and business intelligence strategy, covering the spectrum from ad-hoc reporting to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and decision support. As part of SSI's Quickstart implementation methodology, your reporting strategy will be agreed reflecting your business requirements and budget.

Reporting and Business Intelligence Options

The technical requirements to support efficient information management are different from the technical requirements to support high performance transaction-based ERP systems such as TROPOS. The design of the reporting solution must have minimal performance impact on transaction updates, and provide information on-demand in detail and summary form. The presentation format of the information will vary according to the requirements and role of the user.

SSI provides a range of business intelligence solutions depending on the scope of requirements, from simple querying tools to sophisticated business intelligence applications. The TROPOS database uses an open, SQL-compliant database allowing the user choice of reporting and analysis tools to give easy and controlled access to the organisation's information, supporting decision making at all points in the supply chain. 

SSI partners with Microsoft and Cognos to supply BI solutions incorporating Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, Analysis Services and Scorecard Manager, or Cognos Impromptu and Cognos PowerPlay. SSI provides a continually growing set of TROPOS database views and BI templates to enable BI solutions to be deployed quickly with either toolset.

For simple reporting, report writer tools can read the transaction database directly. For more complex or more frequent reports, we recommend that a data warehouse/replicated database is maintained, so that the information is always as up to date as the requirements dictate. This means that the reporting and transaction performance is maximised across the system. The reporting database can either be a copy of the transaction database, or a data warehouse which is maintained in parallel to the transaction database having additional support for business intelligence, including pre-calculated summaries, benchmarks and target data, and also data from other sources. The data warehouse can be designed and built to reflect your company’s specific requirements.

Example Reporting Configurations based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005

1. Use Reporting Services to report directly from a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database
2. Create a reporting database or Data Warehouse, either as a replicated transaction database or a data warehouse designed to containing selective data, configured for optimised reporting and analysis, fed by “Extract, Transform and Load” (ETL) programs reading multiple data sources. Use Reporting Services to report from this database, improving performance for both transaction and reporting systems.
3. Use Analysis Services to provide Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) for summary, drill-down, comparison and trend analysis of the data. SSI can supply Data Mart and Analysis Templates for Microsoft Analysis Services.
4. Use Business Scorecard Manager as a comprehensive scorecard and dashboard application that allows employees to define and manage business performance against KPI.
5. Distribute Business Information in many different forms. Information can be published on an intranet. For more sophisticated information sharing, Microsoft SharePoint provides a portal which is the ideal environment in which to deploy information company-wide, with security management and information formatting customised to suit individual roles.

SSI's expert knowledge of TROPOS, Microsoft technologies, Cognos products and the manufacturing industry means we are ideally placed to provide services that enable you to get the most out of the data within your business systems. Services include:

Turning that data into information, then providing that information to the user in the most suitable format gives management increased control over business performance.