If you run multiple ERP systems within your organisation – perhaps across different sites, divisions or operating companies – getting a single view of management information and data can be tough.

In this article we’ll look at how specific characteristics of Cloud Business Intelligence solutions can help tackle this challenge.  In a way that is faster, less intrusive and more cost effective than with traditional integration approaches.

The Challenge

You could have ended up with several ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) or other systems as your company has grown or through acquisitions.  Perhaps you run one ERP in your headquarters and another in your branch office(s).  You buy another company and they run a third system, from a third vendor.

However you ended up here, your company’s data is spread across multiple ERPs and systems.

What challenges does this present?

• Data is physically located on different servers, sites and countries
• It is held in different database technologies e.g. MS SQL, Oracle, Informix or older, proprietory technologies
• The “shape” of the data is different in each system, held in tables with different names, columns and structures
• Even if you run the same ERP vendor and version in different locations, coding schemes, product names, currencies and nominal accounts will differ from site to site
• Data quality and duplication issues will be present across the estate of systems

All this makes integration and reporting difficult.  Whilst you may get a reguar set of top-line numbers presented ot you, perhaps through the use of a manual or automated financial consolidation process, it’s still really difficult to ask and answer a really simple company-wide question like, “what did we sell yesterday?”.

Data quality and consistency is a big challenge when you run multiple ERPs too.  If you have multiple operating companies in your group, it’s likely they sell (at least in part) to some of the same customers or sell some of the same products.  But are these named consistently?

These challenges can often only be resolved with expensive, error-prone, slow, manual reporting, often completed buy some of the most important people in the business – senior finance or IT team staff.  Management information is slow to be issued.  Bottlenecks form around key individuals.  Managing the company as a whole is painful.

Why is Cloud BI Uniquely Placed to Help?

Cloud Business Intelligence solutions are a real useful weapon when it comes to integrating mutliple ERPs, quicly and easily.

With a Cloud BI solution, such as Matillion BI, you can create a single, Cloud-based Data Warehouse.  This can then be populated with data from each of your ERPs.  Using ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) technology, you can implement business rules to unify product and customer codes, calculate currencies, exclude inter-company transactions and deliver a single, integrated, clean data set.

Cloud BI is zero-footprint and designed to be easy to use, so once you have your data integrated, it’s fast to allow managers to dive into it, build reports and self-serve.

Finally, integration technology such as the Matillion Data Accelerator, allows you to talk to any type of ERP, new or old, and consolidate information from around the world, delivering an always up to date view of the business.

So using Cloud BI, you integrate multiple ERP systems far more quickly and less painfully than traditional integration projects and potentially remove the need for costly and risky ERP consolidation projects.

For more information about deploying a Cloud Business Intelligence solution, download our free e-book, the Complete Guide to Evaluating and Implementing Business Intelligence.

The post Integrating ERP Systems | A single version of the truth using Cloud BI appeared first on Matillion.

It’s great for drawing attention to particular numbers or categorizing information graphically.

Examples of conditional formatting in your self service reporting include:

• Showing negative numbers in red
• Highlighting over or under performance
• Categorising information with colour or format (e.g. high priority transactions in orange, overdue payments shown in bold and with a bright colour)

To add conditional formatting is easy.  Follow these simple steps:

• Select and open your self-service report from the Matillion BI repository.  You can do this by using the ‘View Reports’ button on the home page.  Note: conditional formatting only works on Table reports.  Not on cross-tabs and not in ad-hoc views.

Selecting a self-service report from the repository

• Click on the column top you wish to use conditional formatting on

Choosing ‘Formatting’ from the column top options

• Select ‘Conditional Formatting’ then choose the rules and colours you would like to apply.  You can customise the font, decoration (e.g. bold/italic), font colour and background colour based on rules you setup.

Specify Rules and Formatting Choices.

• Tips: Bold and font colour ‘red’ works well for low or negative numbers.  In general, background colours are better for drawing attention.  Paler background colours look nicer. If using percentages or currencies, you must use the symbol e.g. ‘Greater than 50%’ or ‘Greater Than £50, rather than ‘Greater Than 50′

Here are some examples of self-service reports with conditional formatting applied:

Example self-service report using conditional formatting – High & Low Margin Report.
Shows recent orders where margin is more than 50% or less than 5%.

Example self-service report using conditional formatting:
NHS Hospital A + E Admissions

If you would like a demonstration of self service reporting in Cloud Business Intelligence solution Matillion BI, use the link below:

The post Using Conditional Formatting in your Self Service Reporting appeared first on Matillion.

Embarking on a self-service reporting or BI implementation for your company probably makes sense. 

After all, well implemented Business Intelligence solutions can deliver huge returns.  Delivering the insight you need to find new sales, rationalise inventory, streamline performance, boost cash.  All the while saving lots of time creating manual reports.

But how can you ensure you’re successful?  Like many IT projects, a BI implementation can be tricky.  Over 1/3rd of all IT project overrun by at least 100%.  Approx 3/4 of Business Intelligence projects fail.  Scary stuff.

Use these great trade secrets to ensure your BI implementation delivers, on-time and on-budget.  Whether it’s sales analysis, self-service reporting or data visualization that’s driving your requirements, these techniques will help you deliver BI that benefits your business, fast.

• Build a business case - before you can get started on your BI implementation, you need to justify it to yourself, your colleagues and your budget holders.  Learn how business intelligence software pays its way in this article then build a business case for your organisation
• Identify your requirements – develop a list of requirements for your business intelligence implementation.  Split this into two parts: what data you need to analyse (e.g. revenue, margin, debtor days, KPIs); and what features you need from the front-end BI/reporting tool (Tip: the first part of the is more important!)
• Select the right technology - Evaluate the types of BI solution available (e.g. traditional on-premise; cloud business intelligence; hand-cranked solutions) and shortlist those most suitable for your needs based on your requirements, budget, timescales and attitude to risk
• Define your Facts and Dimensions - Define the Facts (business events), Dimensions (business entities) and Measures (numbers and values) you need to satisfy your reporting and analysis requirements.
• Use bite size chunks – based on the your BI requirements as defined above, organise your project into bite-size chunks e.g. Sales Analysis, then Inventory Analysis.  This way you can deliver function-by-function, or department-by-department, gaining value from your BI implementation in each area then moving on.
• Prioritise features  - business intelligence companies are great at telling you the latest, greatest feature is essential.  The reality is that most BI users use basic self-service reporting more than any other whizzy feature.  Decide what’s important to you and select accordingly.  Don’t be sold on the bells and whistles.
• Find and evaluate your data – perform an audit of where the data that supports your reporting requirements is held.  Will the data format, structure or shape need changing to make it useful for reporting?  Will calculations or manipulations need to be applied to it to get useful information?  Is it in more than one place?
• Use a Data Warehouse - if the answer to any of the questions in ‘Find and evaluate your data’ was “yes”, then you need a Data Warehouse and an ETL layer.  A Data Warehouse allows you to get all your data into one place (one version of the truth) and apply business rules to it (e.g. currency calculations, KPIs, rebate/cost/discount rules, data cleansing).  A DWH also makes it easier for the user to report, as the data can be arranged into a format optimised for reporting (so called, “de-normalisation”).  ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) takes the data from the source systems, transforms is and loads it into the Data Warehouse
• and a meta-data layer – a meta data layer abstracts the business user from nasty, technical field and table names.  So rather than adding ‘CNM001′ from table ‘CSMST05′ and joining it to another 5 tables using complicated SQL, the user can simply drag-and-drop ‘Customer Name’ and ‘Net Value’ onto their report.  A meta-data layer also allows you to pre-define relationships in the data and enforce security rules.
• Tackle “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out.  This is one of the number one concerns people have in BI implementations.  As part of your data assessment, you will already know where you data is and in what sort of shape.  Start ti improve it now.  You can read more on data qualitity and GIGO in this blog post
• Develop key-note reports – make sure you deliver one or two key-note reports early.  Reports that look great and deliver value.  This will gain momentum for your BI implementation

Using these tips and techniques, your BI implementation will rock – helping you deliver the stronger, smarter business you want to be.

Download our free e-book, ‘The Complete Guide To Evaluating and Implementing Business Intelligence and Self-Service Reporting’ to learn in detail about each of these topics and more.

The post The 11 Secrets to Ensuring Your BI Implementation Delivers appeared first on Matillion.

Well, here are simple 7 ways that something fast and cost effective to implement – cloud-based self service reporting and business intelligence – could deliver REAL bottom line impact in months or weeks: driving-up revenue, freeing-up working capital, growing margins, increasing cash and saving time.

Each of the following ideas are ways we’ve seen Matillion cloud business intelligence customers deliver bottom line improvements in the last 12 months.  They’re real world and proven.

With a cloud-based or ‘SaaS’ self-service reporting solution, you can realistically deploy quickly, without large capital outlay or a time consuming project.  So it is realistic to deliver this kind of business change in time to affect your 2013 results.

Here are the 7 great ways you could improve your bottom line by Q3 using self service reports and Cloud Business Intelligence:

• Help your reps find magic in their best customers.  Pull each of your reps into a meeting or a call.  Drop their current year sales onto a self-service report, and sort by customer and spend.  Click and drag to isolate their top 10 customers, then add product line to the columns and view visually.  You’ll see, in 60 seconds work, where the gaps are in what your reps are selling to their best customers.  You’ll find customers that would be your best account if they bought other lines from you.  Others who are not buying any of your best-selling ranges.  Target your reps to cross-sell to 2 or 3 of the most obvious accounts and review again in a month.
• Find the customers who have lost the love for you and win them back.  Create a self service report on invoiced Gross Margin.  Using the Rolling Last 12 Months field, filter for all invoices in the last 12 months and the 12 months prior (LTM and PLTM).  Order by size and select the top 100 (for example).   Now, add Rolling LTM to the columns and create a % of column group field to see the difference in spend between the last 12 months and the 12 before.  Sort descending and you now have a report of all customers who are spending less in the last year than that before. Click on any customer to see detail of exactly what they were buying then and now and act to resolve the issue, perhaps with a well-timed called from an executive or offering a promotion.  Tip: Add filter for sales person, territory, product group or customer sector for a more focused sales analysis
• Focus on getting paid with a cash war room.  Create a self-service report that shows the top 20 overdue payments owed to your company, by value.  Sort descending and use the scheduler to share this report with your credit controller or account management team daily or weekly.  Add room in the report design for team members to enter some narrative – perhaps a reason and next action.  In groups of companies, use a filter by company/site/etc to create a weekly war room report for each division.  Add a graph to show your progress on credit control over the year.
• Avoid running low on stock.  Have us add to your Matillion BI repository a “Buyers Report” or “Stock Vs Sales” virtual cube (note: this requires both the ‘Sales Analysis’ and ‘Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis’ modules).  This virtual cube will join together sales history information with current stock and orders.  Build a cross-tab using the virtual cube to show: average weekly sales volume (based on last 12 months); average weekly sales volume (based on last 6 weeks); stock available, stock weeks available (based on average).  Sort to find all product lines where you could be running out of stock based on a sales spike.
• Free up working capital by rationalizing inventory  Repeat the above procedure where your stock weeks are too high.  Consider putting these products on promo and reducing re-order levels.
• Price like a ninja taking into account rebates, retros, discounts and deliveries.  Analysing the profitability of your sales using Gross Margin sounds simple enough, but getting a true view on the profitability of a particular product/price/customer combination can be difficult.  Complex customer or supplier side rebates or retros make calculating ‘true gross margin’ a complex task.  Factoring in delivery costs is important to evaluate.  Use business rules and ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) as part of a Cloud BI solution to automatically calculate True Gross Margin.  Then use a cross-tab drill down to find deals  where you’ve cut the price too thin.
• Avoid bad business.  An easy one, this one.  Build a table report of Sales Orders and set a ‘Relative Day’ date filter to ‘PD’ (prior day).  Add columns for customers, sales rep, product and anything else you want, then add a filter to identify any orders over, for example, 50% gross margin or below, for example, 5% gross margin.  Add conditional formatting to highlight the high margin orders in green and the very low margin orders in red.  Finally, set up a daily schedule to have the report sent to you first thing in the morning.  Presto, a report which shows you any Sales Orders  you’ve taken where the margin is too low to be attractive, or too high to be true (in which case they’re probably typing mistakes).  You can now react before the orders are shipped, avoiding expensive crediting processes or reacting to unprofitable business.

More tips on how you can deliver bottom line impact in time for Q3 using cloud-based self service reporting and business intelligence next time.

The post 7 Ways Self Service Reporting Could Improve Your Bottom Line By Q3 appeared first on Matillion.

The Northern Tech Awards were launched in 2011 to recognise tech entrepreneurs and their companies.  Organised by UK technology community Techcelerate, the awards are a prestigious recognition of achievement in the IT, software and technology industries in the UK.

Matillion and Cloud BI solution Matillion BI are the only Business Intelligence company among the finalists.  We’re delighted to have been nominated for ‘Best Venture Backed Early Stage Tech Company 2013′ and also, ‘Most Innovative Tech Company 2013′.

Matillion is helping companies all over the world access their management information more quickly, easily and effectively.  Using modern Cloud BI technology as well as industry vertical modules for Sales Analysis, Financial Analysis, Supply Chain & Inventory Analysis and Production Analysis, we’re delivering easy-to-use, powerful self-service reporting and analytics faster, more cost effectively and with less hassle or risk than traditional business intelligence companies.

Based in Knutsford, Cheshire, Matillion’s team of implementation consultants, customer success consultants and product developers design, build and deliver Matillion BI to a portfolio of mid-size and blue chip clients in 10 countries.

For more information about Matillion BI please contact Matthew Scullion (matthew.scullion@matillion.com) or get a free demonstration.  For more information about the Northern Tech Awards visit northerntechawards.com.

Fingers crossed for the event tonight and follow #NTA13 on Twitter for all the latest gossip.

The post Northern Tech Awards 2013 | Cloud Business Intelligence Company Matillion Finalists in 2 Categories appeared first on Matillion.

Early on, most customers share with us their concerns about data quality.

Which, to be sure, is perfectly understandable. Few businesses—and even fewer small, fast-growing businesses—believe that their data is as clean, structured and error-free as it could be.

And so a familiar dialogue often ensues.

“We like what we hear about cloud business intelligence, but our data quality is poor,” they tell us. “We have different formats, codings and descriptions across different areas of our business, and data is inconsistent or duplicated across—or even within—our systems.”

Breaking the barrier

The obvious concern: poor data will act as a barrier to business intelligence in the cloud, hampering progress and lowering the ROI. Or, as the old saying puts it, “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

Indeed, some prospective customers go even further. Data quality is such an issue, they believe, that there’s no point investing in a cloud-based Business Intelligence and Self‑Serve Reporting project until those data quality issues are resolved.

Making a start

That said, there’s no reason to be complacent. If you think that you’re likely to be considering a cloud-based Business Intelligence and Self‑Serve Reporting project any time soon, then work undertaken today will undoubtedly speed the resulting time-to-benefit tomorrow.

Here, for instance, are three quick ways to productively prepare the ground for Cloud Business Intelligence and Self-Serve Reporting, while also raising data quality.

• Dimensions and attributes. Think about how you might want to ‘slice and dice’ your Business Intelligence reports—by Customer, Product, Date, Territory/Country, Sales Representative, or Supplier, for instance. Are those dimensions and attributes consistently reflected in your data right now? If not, make a start.

• Product and item coding. A Product dimension, for instance, will usually need a consistent Product Code/SKU and Name or Description. Again, make a start now. But also consider other information that you might want to identify—Product Group, Category, Unit of Measure or Colour. And don’t forget purchased items, either—thereby preparing the ground for improved procurement analytics.

• Consistent customer descriptions. Get a list of all of your customers, define some key groupings (Sector, End‑user type, Size), send this list to your sales team and get them to correctly and consistently categorise each customer. There’s no need to add the data to transactions today—but you’ll save time when implementing your Business Intelligence project later.

The post Debunking the ‘data quality’ myth: 3 ways Cloud Business Intelligence can help appeared first on Matillion.

• What do we want to analyse?
• How should our data warehouse be designed?
• Where is our data?  And in what format or technology?
• What are my data quality issues?

As with all significant IT projects, the requirements analysis stage can be time-consuming and painful.  It’s also where the project can be set up to fail before it’s started.

At Matillion we like to deliver value fast.  We also focus on specific market verticals and company types which means we have a really good understanding of our customer’s reporting requirements.  As such, we’ve been able to develop industry ready “modules” of business intelligence functionality designed to deliver all the reporting and analysis functionality you require for a given functional area of your business.

Each module is integrated, tailored and customised on implementation to deliver a high-fidelity fit to your requirements.  So they’re not “cookie-cutter” templates that you have to like or lump. But they do contain all the facts and dimensions that we expect a company in a specific vertical to need to analyse their business.

We have modules available for:

• Sales Analysis
• Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis
• Finance Analysis
• Production Analysis

So what’s in the modules?

Sales Analysis

The sales analysis module delivers all the functionality we expect a mid-size, product-centric business to need to analyse their sales activities.  Customers, products, margins, revenues, volumes, budgets, targets, sales people, geographies, orders, deliveries, invoices and forward order book are all part of the sale module.

The sales analytics module is designed to follow the process of the typical B2B product-centric company’s sales cycle.  As such it contains the following “Facts”:

• Sales Orders
  • Inbound orders from your customers
• Order Balances/Forward Orders/Order Book
  • Orders before they are fulfilled, showing your order book forward in time
• Deliveries
  • Products being despatched and delivered to your customers, usually including on-time-in-full (OTIF) and similar statistics as well as being useful for revenue recognition purposes
• Sales Invoices
  • Invoicing (and credits), usually including revenue, gross margin and quantity related measures
• Budgets
  • Target or budget figures by time company/site/division, customer, product, sales person and/or time-period

Each “Fact” contains all the “Measures” or values you need to analyse that business activity.  So for Sales Invoice, you may have measures configured for: quantity sold, unit of measure, net/gross value, cost, others cost, rebates/retros, gross margin and gross margin after rebate/retro/delivery. The financial measures may be expressed in multiple currencies, e.g. local, reporting, budget and spot currencies.

You can have as many measures as needed for your requirements, add more at any time during your Matillion BI subscription (at no extra cost) and make use of Matilion’s ETL technology and business rules to perform calculations (e.g. rebates, commissions).

Each “Fact” is accompanied by any Dimensions you may require to allow your users to drill-down, group, filter, slice and pivot through Sales Analytics data easily and powerfully.  Example Dimensions for the Sales Analysis module may include:

• Product (including e.g. Product Code/SKU, Name/Description, Product Groups, Unit of Measure, Colour/Size/Material/Style, Category, Type, Source, ABC Analysis)
• Customer (including e.g. Name, Code/Account Number, Group, Sector, Status, Credit Limit, Type)
• Region/Country/Geography (e.g. UK -> Europe -> International, or Manchester -> North West, UK)
• Sales Person (including e.g. Name, Manager, Territory)
• Company/Site/Division
• Date (including e.g. Date, Year, Quarter, Week, Day, Relative Day/Week/Month/Year, Rolling Last 12 Months, Financial Year and fixed-period e.g. 4-4-5)

Other Dimensions can be added and each can have as many elements configured as required.

In this way, if a user would like to understand, for instance, the top selling product groups to customers in sector ‘Independent Retailer’, then drill-down to SKU level, compare regional differences and see how this has changed against the prior year, they can do so in a few clicks and without complex queries or special technical skills.

Advanced sales analytics can be performed over any of the data in the module using Matillion’s virtual cube technology.  Examples include:

• Orders vs Invoicing
• Rolling LTM (Last 12 Months)
• Stock vs Sales * In conjunction with the Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis Module

Example common uses and “killer apps” of the Sales Analysis module within Matillion BI include:

• Powerful, drill-down analysis of performance of products, customers, sales people and regions over time and by geography
• Analysis of “true margins”, after applying complex rebate and retro calculations or after factoring in costs such as delivery.  This can allow, for instance, more informed pricing decisions
• Gap analysis across customers – spotting opportunities to sell products a customer used to buy but no longer does, or where they could be expected to buy based on the profiles of other similar customers
• Measuring performance against budgets and targets
• Providing sales teams and managers with access to self-service reporting from their office or home computer, their mobile device or tablet.  Also through use of scheduled reports to, for instance, automatically send sales people regular updates of the sales actuals against target –driving desirable behaviour and saving time in sales operations or finance
• Using sales analytics, for instance on tablet PC, whilst face-to-face with customers.  This can help inform buying decisions and demonstrate a level of aptitude and modernity with customers
• Spotting undesirable business and data input errors early e.g. orders with gross margin is less than 5% (unprofitable) or higher than 80% (likely an order entry mistake)
• Avoiding excess stock or missed sales opportunities by analysing sales trends against budgets and inventory positions *in conjunction with the Inventory and Supply Chain analysis module

Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis

The Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis module again delivers all the functionality we expect a product-centric business to need to analyse their purchasing activities and inventory.  Suppliers, products, prices, volumes, managers, regions, orders, deliveries, purchase invoices, daily stock positions and stock history are all part of the Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis module.

The Inventory and Supply Chain analytics module is again designed to follow the process of the typical B2B product-centric company’s purchasing activities.  As such it contains the following “Facts”:

• Purchase Orders
  • Orders placed with your suppliers
• Goods Receipts
  • Inbound inventory including delivery statistics (e.g. on-time-in-full/OTIF)
• Purchase Invoices
  • Supplier invoices including current and historic average pricing and statuses
• Daily Stock
  • The inventory value and quantity in stock now, by product and location
• Stock History
  • The inventory value and quantity in stock now and back through time, period-by-period and by product and location.  This usually also includes analysis of “ins and outs” – stock movement activity.

Each “Fact” contains all the “Measures” or values you need to analyse that business activity.  So for Goods Receipt, you may have measures configured for: quantity ordered, quantity received, value, unit of measure, delivery against requested and delivery against promised. Again, any financial measures may be expressed in multiple currencies.

You can have as many measures as needed for your requirements, add more at any time during your Matillion BI subscription (at no extra cost) and make use of Matilion’s ETL technology and business rules to perform calculations.

Each “Fact” is accompanied by any Dimensions you may require to allow your users to drill-down, group, filter, slice and pivot through Inventory and Supply Chain data easily and powerfully.  Example Dimensions for the Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis module may include:

• Product (including e.g. Product Code/SKU, Name/Description, Product Groups, Unit of Measure, Colour/Size/Material/Style, Category, Type, Source, ABC Analysis)
• Supplier (including e.g. Name, Code/Account Number, Group, Type, Status, Credit Limit)
• Region/Country/Geography
• Manager or Buyer
• Company/Site/Division
• Date (including e.g. Date, Year, Quarter, Week, Day, Relative Day/Week/Month/Year, Rolling Last 12 Months)

Other Dimensions can be added and each will have as many elements configured as required.

In this way, if a user would like to understand, for instance, what percentage of the current year purchasing originated in China, broken down by product group, or relative delivery performance of alternative suppliers, they can do so in a few clicks.

Example, common uses and “killer apps” of the Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis module within Matillion BI include:

• Powerful, drill-down analysis of purchasing by supplier, manager, region/country and company/division/site
• Analysis of supplier delivery and order completeness performance
• Identification of rationalisation opportunities across supplier and product types or specific SKUs e.g. is the same product being purchased from different suppliers, or the same supplier being used by different parts of the organisation
• Rationalisation of inventory holding to ensure sales supply but not excess stock based on historical and recent sales trends, current stock and incoming orders *when used in conjunction with the Sales Analysis module
• Automatic, scheduled reporting to suppliers of stock positions, goods receipts and delivery performance

Financial Analysis

Matillion’s Financial Analysis delivers self-serve reporting and analysis functionality over ledgers and financial transactions.  Ledger balances, ledger entries, open items, payments, accounts, liquidity, balance sheets, P&L, cost centres/units and financial ratios are all delivered as part of the Finance Analysis module.

The Financial Analysis module is particularly useful where the business wish to perform analysis beyond what is typically performed by an accounting package or ERP finance module (e.g. drill-downs, trends, graphical analysis or ratios); where the business wishes to share self-serve reports, analysis functionality or data visualisation based on financial data with the business beyond the finance department; or where the ERP or packaged Finance reporting functionality is inflexible, insufficient or difficult to access.

It contains the following “Facts”:

• Ledgers Entries
  • Journal entries onto accounts
• Ledger Balances
  • Current and historical balances of ledger accounts
• Open Items
  • Supplier and customer payments and credits, to be completed
• Payments
  • Payments made and received, including status and overdue/dunning information
• Cost Centre/Unit Balances and Entries
  • For use where Cost Accounting is used

Each “Fact” contains all the “Measures” or values you need to analyse that business activity.  So for Payment, you may have measures configured for: value, due date, payment date, overdue days and dunning block.  Again, any financial Measures may be expressed in multiple currencies.

You can have as many measures as needed for your requirements, add more at any time during your Matillion BI subscription (at no extra cost) and make use of Matilion’s ETL technology and business rules to perform calculations, such as the calculation of financial ratios (liquidity, inventory turnover etc).

Each “Fact” is accompanied by any Dimensions you may require to allow your users to drill-down, group, filter, slice and pivot through Financial Analysis data easily and powerfully.  Example Dimensions for the Finance Analysis module may include:

• Product (including e.g. Product Code/SKU, Name/Description, Product Groups, Unit of Measure, Colour/Size/Material/Style, Category, Type, ABC Analysis)
• Supplier (including e.g. Name, Code/Account Number, Group, Type, Status, Credit Limit)
• Customer (including e.g. Name, Code/Account Number, Group, Sector, Status, Credit Limit, Type)
• Account (including e.g. P&L or B/S, Asset/Liability/Variable Classification, Coding, Name/Description)
• Company/Site/Division
• Date (including e.g. Date, Year, Quarter, Week, Day, Relative Day/Week/Month/Year, Rolling Last 12 Months)

Other Dimensions can be added and each will have as many elements configured as required.

In this way, if a user would like to understand, for instance, how quickly retail multiple pay in the UK, current year against prior year, they can do so easily.

Example, common uses and “killer apps” of the Finance Analysis module within Matillion BI include:

• Powerful drill-down analysis, self-serve reporting and data visualisation of financial transactions by company, customer, supplier, time period, type and account(s)
• Analysis of customer and site/division/company payment performance, helping improve debtor days and free up cash
• Monitoring and analysis of key financial ratios e.g. inventory turnover, debtor days, and liquidity, by product group or site/division/company

Production Analysis

The Production Analysis module with Matilion BI delivers functionality for manufacturers to analyse their production activities.  It includes concepts such as: Work orders, operational steps/processes/procedures, work cells/production lines/machines, labour, capacity, utilisation and wastage.

The Production analytics module contains the following “Facts”:

• Works Orders
  • Requests to manufacture goods
• Operations Steps/Procedures/Processes
  • Steps within the production of a works order
• Capacity Calendar
  • Theoretical production capability based on working hours, days and throughput

Each “Fact” contains all the “Measures” or values you need to analyse that business activity.  So for Operation Step, you may have measures configured for: planned time, feedback time, planned labour, feedback labour, waste and status.

You can have as many measures as needed for your requirements, add more at any time during your Matillion BI subscription (at no extra cost) and make use of Matilion’s ETL technology and business rules to perform calculations.

Each “Fact” is accompanied by any Dimensions you may require to allow your users to drill-down, group, filter, slice and pivot through Production Analysis data easily and powerfully.  Example Dimensions for the Production Analysis module may include:

• Product (including e.g. Product Code/SKU, Name/Description, Product Groups, Unit of Measure, Colour/Size/Material/Style, Category, Type, ABC Analysis)
• Work Cell/Machine/Production Line
• Company/Site/Division
• Date (including e.g. Date, Year, Quarter, Week, Day, Relative Day/Week/Month/Year, Rolling Last 12 Months, fixed period e.g. 4-4-5)

Other Dimensions can be added and each will have as many elements configured as required.

In this way, if a user would like to understand, for instance, how much waste is produced by a certain machine on a particular shift and how this is improving over time, this is easy to achieve.

It is worth noting that Production Analysis works best when production lines, factories and machines are partially or fully equipped with data capture technologies – as BI can only report over data that is actually there.

Other Analysis Requirements

Matillion’s standard modules provide core, common and comprehensive analysis capabilities over the most common areas of analysis and self-serve reporting need.  That said, if you need analysis over a different area, that’s no problem.

Need self-serve reporting over HR and Payroll?  No problem.  Want to visualise Health and Safety data collated in one of your systems?  We can do that too.

Matillion will build, based on a fixed price model, any bespoke or custom facts to fit your requirements.  If you have a great idea for a new module, we’ll talk to you about developing it, either for your exclusive use or integration into our product line.

Using Modules and our innovative ‘Nexus’ platform (which we use to rapidly create and tailor your BI solution), Matillion is able to deliver comprehensive, easy to use, cloud-based business intelligence, self-service reporting and data visualisation fast and cost effectively – giving you access to the vital information you need to grow your business.

You can learn more about the key concepts of Matillion BI, such as: Reporting, Analysis, Report Scheduling/Scheduled Reports, Mobile Access, Microsoft Excel Integration and the Matillion Data Accelerator, in other blog posts in this series.

The post The Modules | Sales Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis, Finance Analysis & Production Analysis appeared first on Matillion.

Cloud BI – Keeping Decision Makers In The Moment

Business intelligence (BI) is all about gathering information to access and influence business decision making. There are several additional trends together with ‘big data’ that are shaping the BI world: collaboration, cloud bi, in memory technologies, mobile BI, self service BI and dashboards.

Self service

Self service BI allows end users to make personalized reports and analytics. This allows the freeing of IT staff to focus on other matters which will improve the speed of decision-making. This is because self service software can be used by personnel that are not particularly technically minded.

This approach increases the reach and depth of BI applications to focus a wider range of business needs and problems. Self service BI must support IT staff’s need for collaborative decision-making. IT staff must be more self reliant by encouraging a BI environment that is more usable and more consumable.

Mobile BI

Mobile business intelligence (BI) is the capability to garner business essential information on all mobile devices, like smart-phones, notebooks and tablets. Mobile BI has been around since the mobile phone first came into being, but only lately has it become much more popular in improving the speed of decision making. This is because of huge improvements to mobile technology and increased use of mobile phones in commerce throughout all industrialized countries.

Big Data

Big Data has the ability to improve the speed of decision making by utilizing huge amounts of structured and unstructured data. This may well include social media messages which can provide lots of valuable insights.

Cloud BI

The cloud is a serious option which should not be underestimated. Cloud BI  is used to gather BI related information like dashboards, KPIs, and key business metrics. The main advantage of a cloud Bi is that it does not need additional software or hardware; personnel simply go to a specific URL and enter a login and access BI information.

Collaboration

Business has seen many changes which have included improvements in Internet technology. This has given way to the rise of mobile and social media. This has increased the focus on collaboration, and business intelligence. BI isn’t new but what is new is the volume of data that these systems must now simulate to help provide important business insights. The big change now is that companies are developing ways to turn data into insight.

In memory technology

There are lots of different opinions about what in memory technology is. It is basically a database management system that first relies on the computer’s main memory for data storage. This is an alternative to a database management system that uses disk storage. This improves the speed of decision-making because main memory databases are much quicker than storage disk databases. There are fewer CPU instructions due to internal optimization. It is also quicker to retrieve data. This provides extremely fast analytics for running data-centric enterprise applications in the cloud.

All the above business intelligence practices used combined in a cloud bi environment can greatly improve insights and enhance the speed of decision-making.

The post Improving the speed of decision-making: How Cloud BI keeps decision-makers in the moment appeared first on Matillion.

The Real Good Food Company is the largest independent non-refining distributor of sugar in Europe. They are also a supplier of dairy and bakery ingredients, coatings and jams and a manufacturer of sweet bakery products for a range of major retailers.

Matillion and RGFC will be working over the coming weeks to implement cloud business intelligence and self-serve reporting in their Napier Brown sugar business. This will provide easy to use, fast to implement drill-down sales analysis, inventory and supply chain analysis and financial analysis to their managers and executives.

Project Summary:

• Pain Points: Self-Serve Reporting and Analysis, Ability to Join Information Together (e.g. Sales and Inventory)
• Modules Selected: Sales Analysis, Inventory and Supply Chain Analysis and Production Analysis
• Core Systems: Infor System 21 on IBM AS/400
• Why they selected Matillion: Ability to join and drill-down into data; cloud based, easy to use, self-serve reporting and analysis; low/no maintenance required by in-house IT team

The implementation is currently underway.

Curious to see how Matillion could work for your company?

The post Real Good Food Company choose Matillion for Cloud Business Intelligence appeared first on Matillion.

A question that we’re often asked is: “Can I afford Business Intelligence?”

And it’s a perfectly sensible question, to be sure. Particularly in the present economic environment.

But increasingly, our answer—driven by hard-nosed facts and our customers’ experiences—is to respond by asking yet another question.

In short, can you afford not to have Business Intelligence?

And put this way, the answer is much clearer. From both an operational perspective and a strategic one, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Business Intelligence is an investment with a seductive return on investment (ROI).

Especially cloud-based Business Intelligence, with its low cost of entry, affordable monthly subscription, and fast time-to-benefit.

Pain points

The chances are, you’ll be familiar—perhaps all too familiar—with the sort of pain points that our customers formerly experienced before moving to Matillion.

Insightful analysis of pricing and margins, what’s more, can help to align strategy to execution, and thereby identify areas to grow, and areas to back away from. The result? Additional revenues and margin, while simultaneously avoiding loss-making revenue holes.

And gap analysis across sales and the supply chain can increase revenues and rationalise purchasing. The result? More sales, lower costs.

Bottom line

All of this, of course, is true for Business Intelligence generally. Here at Matillion, we also advocate cloud Business Intelligence.

You get to your benefits with a lower upfront cost. You get to your benefits with a smaller technology footprint. You get to your benefits sooner. And you get to your benefits with less risk.

All of which, we reckon, tends to yield a higher-than-average ROI, at a lower-than-average cost, and at a lower-than-average risk.

Sounds good? It does to our customers, too. 

Are you considering a Business Intelligence or Self-Service reporting solution?  Would better, faster access to data deliver ROI for your company?

The post Quantifying the ROI of Business Intelligence appeared first on Matillion.