Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence solutions

• A categorization of the different
•        Business Intelligence solutions.
• Data Integration: ETL
• Data Warehousing
• Reporting & OLAP
• CRM softwares
• Not all Predictive Analytic tools
•               are born equal
• Of the utility of the TEST dataset

TIMi Suite added value

• TIMi added value.
• Anatella added value
• Stardust added value

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Reporting & OLAP

There exist many (Many!) different reporting software (i.e. OLAP tools - Online analytical processing tools) that allows you to create charts and graphs about the evolution of different KPI (Key Performance Indexes) that characterizes your business.

Typical KPI's are:

• Number of newly acquired customers
• Churn rate
• Sales amount
• Etc.

Usually, OLAP tools are just adding a small "user-interface-layer" above an already-existing database or data warehouse. This interface allows the users to easily create (with their mouse) some reports.

Some OLAP software are not using any database at all as their back-end engine: these tools store all the data to analyze inside central core RAM memory (instead of accessing the data through a SQL query to a database), to allow extremely fast queries. The disadvantages of this RAM-based-technique are enormous:

• You cannot analyze large enterprise-level databases that won't fit into the limited 4GB ram of your computer.
• You have to duplicate one more time your database (one copy is inside your central database system because you can't live without it and one copy is inside the OLAP tool)

The only advantage of In-RAM-OLAP tools (yes: there is one!) is completely marginal: it's somewhat marginaly faster (a query that takes a few seconds is computed in less than a second) but this added speed is useless if your only goal is to "refresh", once a day during the night, some standard reports.

Some people are using In-RAM-OLAP tools to "explore" their database in order to create a good segmentation of their customer base. As we will see in the next sections, there now exist special-purpose, 100% automated tools that allow you to easily explore your database and create different optimal segmentations, depending of the type of task that you want to accomplish with your segmentation (cross-selling, churn prevention, up-selling, etc.). Because of the existence of these new special-purpose tools, In-RAM-OLAP tools are now obsolete.

Obsolete In-RAM-OLAP tools are: Qlickview, IBM Cognos TM1,...

Differences between tools

The differences between different OLAP tools are:

• Is it "In-RAM-OLAP"?
  If yes: limited scalability, marginal speed increase
  If no: unlimited scalability (depends on the underlying database)
• Charts: Some OLAP software propose only a small sets of charts
• Report Exportation:Some OLAP tools are not able to export their reports into standard formats like: Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, HTML pages,...
  
  You must check carefully your OLAP tool to see if it's able to export its report to Ms Office documents because most of them are not able to do that. It's important to have reports as Ms Office documents to be able to share easily the information contained in the report with your colleagues (through an e-mail). ...or to publish it on a sharepoint portal, for example.

There is a primitive OLAP tool included inside the Anatella software (that is included inside the TIMi suite). With Anatella, you can create any chart that is inside any Ms Office document (Word, Excel & Powerpoint). Anatella is not an "In-Ram-OLAP" tool and thus it's not adapted to do exploratory analysis of our database. Anatella is scalable and can analyze and size of database (as all ETL's) to produce the required reports. Hopefully, the TIMi suite contains two other tools specialized in exploratory analysis of your data: TIMi and Stardust. Typically, Anatella is used to automatically refresh every day or week standard Powerpoint reports that give detailed information about the evolution of different KPI's.

Differences in results between tools

The differences in results between all these tools OLAP tools are:

• None: given enough time and enough human resources, you can create similar reports with all the above tools. The speed of the tool mainly depends on the underlying database. So, I would suggest you to invest in a good database equipment rather in an expensive OLAP tool.

One important thing that very few people know is that there is an extremely powerful OLAP tool that is integrated inside Microsoft Excel! Most people think that you are forced to "export" and copy the whole content of your databases inside an Excel Sheet to be able to use the OLAP tool included into Microsoft Excel! This is not true. Microsoft Excel is able to exploit your database "in direct" without any exportation, like any other classical OLAP tool would do. With Microsoft Excel, you can directly connect to your database system and easily design with your mouse very complex OLAP charts. The data required to create the charts stays inside the database (no exportation required).



Next: Review of CRM softwares

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