'Intelligent' Business

The world is rapidly moving towards convergence and new business and connection paradigms are fast evolving, breaking the traditional quantitative factors in corporate governance.With the fast evolution of 'Collaborative Commerce' (c-comm) optimizing the supply and pattern of distribution channels, a critical factor of data manageability has come into the forefront whereby effective data administration has always given companies a competitive edge over others. It is here that Business Intelligence (BI) comes into play, which provides the foundation of c-comm.

BI can be defined as a broad group of application and technology for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data, to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Data management is however, the enhancing efficiency of the organization with the availability of information and adequate resources at one's disposal. One often tends to confuse between the variants in this sphere; namely enterprise resource planning (ERP) and BI.

An ERP system is an integrated IT application used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to ease the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organization and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. Both BI and ERP solutions are important for an organization to make effective business decisions. Hence for an organization, gaining maximum benefit from an ERP solution requires a robust BI platform.

“The integration of business intelligence and ERP solutions is essential for a business to make the most from their information in the present and foreseeable future. ERP allows companies to have a clear view of the management infrastructure. When business intelligence and ERP meet, they link managers, executives, and other employees in a way that is productive and beneficial for the organization's growth,” said Maneesh Sharma, Business Head-User and Platform, SAP India, discussing about the polarity of ERP and BI.

When an organization goes in for an ERP solution, the challenge typically lies in the availability of a stout tool, which the company can use to automate business processes. Business intelligence comes in when an organization has the IT maturity where it has generated data, but is facing challenges in making sense out of the data and driving business decisions. “To accomplish success, organizations should identify their need and align the correct BI solutions to address them. By matching the technical requirements to that of the business, the overall BI environment is more likely to deliver the desired results,” he added.

Implementation of BI solutions across verticals requires identification of key business functions and starts from the bottom up, to determine the reporting requirements of the various stakeholders in each of these business functions. Not only it is critical to thoroughly define architecture for each function to bring together in one platform, one should strive to develop a coherent architecture with a consistent set of tools and the right degree of integration. “Organizations need to agree upon a collaborative process on building and integrating BI and Performance Management (PM) strategy. Enterprises need to build BI and performance management architecture as a best practice. Working with BI technology in silos or having a tactical approach can potentially lead to inflexible applications, inconsistency in delivery,” Sharma concluded.

In the current uncertain economic scenario, Indian enterprises, like their global counterparts, are also identifying opportunities to streamline operations in order to maintain the bottomline, boost shareholder confidence and create competitive differentiators. Indian enterprises are certainly seeking investment in BI solutions, which enable instant access to the information necessary to make better business decisions. In the Indian context, sectors like IT, banking, telecom and manufacturing have been early adopters of BI technology. It is important to note, that this adoption is true not only for BI solutions, but applicable as a trend for any new technology in general. While these verticals are expected to continue to lead the implementation, there is an enormous line of opportunity in other industries such as retail, financial services and insurance, as they are expected to become aggressive users of business intelligence.

“The overall BI market in India is at a nascent stage, with a huge up-tapped opportunity for vendors to capture. BI can deliver on this promise if deployed successfully, because it can improve decision making and operational efficiency, which in turn drives the topline and the bottomline. Also, information generated from enterprise applications is at an all-time high and will continue to increase. BI platforms can turn that information into an asset on which better business decisions can be made,” said Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence.

According to SAP, the BI industry saw a significant increase of deployment across sectors. The wave of growth opportunities came primarily from infrastructure, telecom, utilities, manufacturing and closely followed by the public sector. The market saw rapid growth as more organizations are turning to cloud-based computing and alternative deployment options.

The Solution Provider Viewpoint

Organizations, whether big or small, are facing lot of challenges in reporting and analysis of data. ERP is capable enough for transactional reporting, but they face challenge when it comes to complex analysis of data available from different sources. These challenges are creating a storm and a whole new set of requirements is emerging around MIS and BI. Organizations have already spent on ERP and now it is time for them to invest in BI. Also, according to Valuepoint, BI solutions in India is growing at a rate of 30 percent in the range of $50 to 75 million. Right now the market is for those organizations, who have had wide experience in ERP implementation over several years and are trying to find the niche tool, which can help them.

Sharing his experience over BI analytic, Chandan Joshi of Phoebus Solutions said, “We thought of entering the BI market about a year back and ran a market survey; however, it did not turn to be quite satisfactory and hence we refrained from focusing majorly over it. However, now, I feel that there is a lot of aggression in the market and the situation is improving. We might consider entering into this segment this year.”

One of the most important steps in BI implementation is to define the BI strategy and the road map. While computer systems are able to show direct and visible benefit to the organization, BI will not be able to do so in the similar manner, as the results are dependent upon the quality and quantum of data, which the organization has. As such, there is a need to educate the customer about the need for BI, how advantageous it is to the customer, what can be expected in terms of RoI, knowledge independency, how it can provide the edge to the client when addressing the competition and his customer, how it can improve the productivity and other related factors.

“Education is also needed to show the difference between standard MIS reports, to what can be generated in a BI, given the predictive algorithms and complex patterns existing in ERP data. ERP can be a storehouse of transactions, but cannot be a true management decision making tool, as that can only be provided by a BI tool,” said Radha Krishna, Senior VP-Technology and Services, Valuepoint.

Although SPs across the country unanimously agree to the fact of the growth of BI, yet the trend is not quite visible compared to mainstream solutions like cloud computing. With the sole purpose of BI being data analytics and reporting, it is often coupled with other solutions for deployment purpose.

Even over the business field, SPs are not in the mood to prefer BI as their primary service offering. Reinstating the same, Hemant Chabria
of Chabria Infotech said, “Although there has been about 20 percent YoY growth in BI, I am not keen to focus over it as our primary focus area.” Explaining the same, he added, “Low profitability in this field and a continuous process of technology change are the primary deterring factors. Although BI solution is there in our kitty, we do not have any plans to expand it further.”

Although BI has not forayed into the tier-2 solution provider segment, owing primarily to its limitation of low margins and time constraint, some of the tier-2 SPs have actually evolved their business by either focusing over this solution or framing a significant department dedicated to BI.

The Champ

Although, there are complexities involved in the BI structure and the time required for its deployment is not feasible for most of the SPs, Team Computers is a company, which has steadily built up its business with special focus over BI with over 120 BI implementations in a three-years time line; contributing to about 15 percent of the consolidated topline of the company. The bottomline share is even higher. The key specialization, for the company has been over large deployments catering primarily to the enterprise segment across verticals. Key clients for Team Computers have been Birla SunLife, SBI Life, Reliance General Insurance, IFFCO Tokio, Videocon Telecom, Crompton Greaves, L&T Finance and several others.

With special techniques developed like Four Stage Data Management, Relationalization, Telescopic Summarization and Q-Deployer Approaches, the company has surely evolved the best practices with its patent Q-Deployer solution making headway into the BI tier-2 SP space. “Our significant success in 2010 has been with Videocon Telecom, doing a record delivery of phase I implementation in less than four months, providing dashboards, analytics and reports for all the business functions. 2010 also marks our concentrated entry into the US market, with success in over 10 customers with key wins like Bloomberg, Symantec and Cisco. We have successfully implemented enterprise-wide reporting solution for a large 100 years old insurance company,” said Avadaiappan Rajendran, CEO-Business Solutions, Team Computers.

Avishek Rakshit
(avishekr@cybermedia.co.in)