Business Intelligence

Under „Business Intelligence“ we understand the automation of reporting. The business data of the ERP-systems is used in order to analyze and evaluate the situation of the company out of different perspectives. The analysis doesn’t occur in the ERP-systems but in a separate database, the data warehouse (DWH). Reasons therefore could be: unsuitable structures of the data in the ERP-system – no possibilities for the evaluation over multiple ERP-systems for example in a corporate group – insufficient possibilities to integrate external data for example of competitors or research institutes – burdening  of the ERP-system through analytical evaluation – continuous changing of the data in the ERP-system.

The first task of a BI-project is therefore, to depose the data of the ERP-system or systems in a separate database, the data warehouse. This is managed by the extraction of the data out of the ERP-system, the transformation and the loading into the data warehouse (ETL).

The second task is the disposing of analytical evaluation, which is necessary for the reporting. This could range from simple aggregations of the sales figures of the last days, weeks, months in the whole or in the single areas up to the complicated statistical analyses per data-mining for trend-analyses or customer behaviour.