But technology capabilities and what we expect from them have moved on. All corners of a business need reliable information. Likewise, consumers of technology expect far more today in how quickly and directly they can get the information they need to do their job. At the same time, because of the complexity most organisations face in working with dozens of platforms and hundreds of different systems, scale is even more difficult to achieve.  To get valuable insights into your business, information from wherever it exists needs to be consolidated. Business Intelligence (BI) offers new hope, but much of the BI landscape is currently occupied by large players. These players often want you to switch all your disparate systems to their technology before they can help you. In this way, the BI market has been positioned as a luxury item with starting price tags in the millions.

At InfoPlanIT we don’t see it that way. We think BI can also be cost effective, easy to use tools that work with all the systems you already have in place. And for optimal success, it needs to made accessible to the broader audience within an organization, not just the top few. Healthy data and reliable information for making decisions is a requirement of successful businesses, not a luxury or something that can wait.

These principles of scalability and access were driving factors in our development of InfoPlanIT Visual Analyzer. For fractions of the price of our large competitors, we have produced a broad platform that works on top of customers existing systems and databases. A recent customer was analyzing cubes and producing reports and dashboards in days and weeks, instead of months and even years needed elsewhere (see our upcoming Case Studies). Instead of spending millions of dollars and many months converting systems, they were cleaning up outlying data issues that were exposed immediately by our flexible BI tools.

A frequent story we’ve heard from business managers involves the need to gather data, metrics, sales performance, inventory turns, RMA’s, etc., then go about the process of analyzing that data for a monthly report, all of which will typically populate a few PowerPoint slides. Many companies also have an Excel spreadsheet for collecting this intermediary information.

Over time a routine has formed where managers will pull the data from the company’s various systems, reformat it, then paste it into Excel. Once in Excel, time to figure out what’s going on and perhaps write up a summary. Summaries and Excel sheets, once ready, then make their way into PowerPoint slides. A report is born. We’ve seen this process take days, even weeks, to complete depending on the complexity and systems.

With IVA and the introduction of IVA Add-In, the entire process of updating these reports can be accomplished in minutes.

Click “update,” revise notes, save as a new report and a report is now completed in a fraction of the time with countless work hours saved. The savings of days and weeks of effort over the course of a year adds up to a lot more time to focus on making better decisions and what’s important to your business. Multiply that savings by every manager that has to submit a report each month or even each week, and you can start to see why we’re so excited!