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If your company activates in retail, distribution, services, telecom, or in any other consumer-oriented business environment, you know that understanding customer motivation to do or not do a certain acquisition is essential for your business survival and development. You need to quickly identify changes in consumer tastes and preferences and act immediately to improve their experiences.

Why didn`t we finish the project on time? Which are the reasons why we exceeded the budget? Do we have enough available employees to start a new project? In financial terms, is it profitable to begin this project?

One of the most critical and time-consuming aspects of retail and distribution is managing the stock. You want to sell the products in stock, but you also need to ensure that you have sufficient stock to meet variable demand. You must have real-time control and visibility of your stock in order to respond to market requirements and remain competitive.

Not long ago, enterprise social media used to be quite simple. Some blogs, used sporadically by a few employees to explain to what use or how to use a certain product/service of the company. Or a bit of social media for marketing purposes.

Now, social media is a growing component of enterprise communication and collaboration. Increasingly, the world is using social networks and other social media-based services to stay in touch, communicate, and collaborate.

In a recent survey realized by Frost&Sullivan PR Agency on 200 C-level executives in North America, sixty-nine percent were closely tracking „social media, placing it ahead of telepresence, VoIP, shared team spaces, soft phones, and even unified communications and unified messaging”. Almost half of the respondents say social media is used within the organization, and 41 percent use the technology personally. Among executives who report social software in use within their company, 67 percent say it is used extensively at all levels of the organization, and another 26 percent say it is used mainly by senior management. The message is that companies are going to use social media as a primary channel in the very near future, if they aren’t already. It’s time to get strategic.

Therefore, both Gartner and Forrester Research said that in 2012 just integrating BI with Excel isn’t good enough any longer and users will demand BI tools that are integrated with email and collaboration platforms. As I said in an earlier post, Gartner predicts that by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments.

MicroStrategy, the largest independent BI provider, which is present in Romania through its partnership with BITSoftware, has taken already ahead of „predictions” and provides a platform for analysis and synchronization of data business and Facebook! „MicroStrategy Social Intelligence”, which contains three modules (Wisdom, Alert & Gateway), lets your company more effectively engage and monetize your Facebook fans.

MicroStrategy Wisdom allows you to get to know your Facebook fans as well as their friends do. You can segment your users based on their interests and motivations (they are, where they come from, and what they like, what activities they enjoy, places they like to go, etc), so that you can target each segment with more relevant and valuable offers and increase engagement with individualized content and recommendations.

With MicroStrategy Alert, you can add marketing and commerce features to your brand's Facebook page to personalize the consumer experience, increase fan engagement and monetize your fan base. Also, you can turn Facebook fans into friends by delivering highly relevant offers, content and promotions to them, encouraging frequent page visits and drawing their attention away from competitor's pages.

With MicroStrategy Gateway, you can gain a 360-degree view of your Facebook app users, combine your corporate view with their social view to see the complete customer and use it to create a one-of-a-kind experience for your customers.

At beginning of a new year, some of the most important BI research agencies – Forrester Research and Gartner - make a few predictions for business intelligence in 2012.

As we announced a month ago, SocrateBI solution is composed of several modules, so we will continue to talk today about PCAM (Project Controlling Analysis Module), addressed to companies working on projects.

Understanding what motivates customers to do business with an organization is a fundamental aspect of today’s customer-centric business environment. To succeed, organizations must quickly identify changes in customer tastes and preferences and act to improve the overall customer experience.

We started a blog post two weeks ago, announcing the launch of SocrateBI solution.

We will continue today to talk here about one of the most important module in the SocrateBI suite: FRAM (the Financial Reporting Analysis Module).

Understanding your organization’s financial health is a fundamental aspect of responding to today’s increasingly stringent financial reporting requirements. To avoid risks, organizations must quickly identify trends in liabilities and assets, analyze and adjust planned and forecasted amounts, and act to provide regulatory statements as needed.

If you are working or managing a financial department, you need to answer to questions such as:

• What are the values of assets and liabilities on a given date?

• What is the value of assets, liabilities, and owners’ equity on a given date?

• What is the breakdown of expenses by organization? Which business units are hitting their targets?

• What are the revenue trends by organization or by revenue types?

• What is the forecasted revenue? Has this forecast changed? Why have revenue forecasts changed?

• What is the actual amount of profit margin by organization or region? What are the associated trends?

• What is the breakdown of costs by vendors, and what are the associated trends?

• What is the change in cash position from period to period?

• Which bills are due this week and for what amounts?

• Are there any customers with payment problems; if so, who needs to be notified?

The standard reports included in an ERP solution are usually not answering very easy on such questions. That’s why, sometimes, reporting to top management is difficult. But what happens if you really need the information faster? Can you afford to wait and delay the decisions? How much this delay will cost you?

With the Socrate BI Financial Reporting Analysis Module, an organization can run reports that replace those typically produced manually by finance or accounting departments, and answer all the above questions.

SocrateBI FRAM is designed to provide in-depth knowledge of corporate financial information. The module includes reports, scorecards (a specific collection of related reports), and dashboards (a collection of related reports customized for optimum display). In addition, some reports show summarized information to help you see trends, while others display very specific, detailed data about your finances and extract intelligence not otherwise evident.

Due to the possibility of analysing fast your profitability, SocrateBI provides not only improvement of internal processes, but also offers support for new development projects. Based on relevant information about Revenue, Expenses and Costs provided by FRAM module, the company`s management will be able to minimize its operating costs.

Also, in times of monetary instability, measuring the collection performance is very important, as delays in collections may cause bottlenecks (jams) with negative effects for the company's activity. To avoid that, the Cash Flow reports provided by SocrateBI’s FRAM module are crucial, focusing on tracking the inflows and outflows of cash for the company and offering information about what happened or will happen as regards of economical results/turnover and allowing to plan the future company`s activity.

The SocrateBI’s FRAM module includes also Profit and Loss Statements, Balance Sheets, Accounts payable and Accounts receivable, Planning and Forecasting reports and metrics, Dashboards and Scorecards, allowing the possibility to dynamically define the exceptions on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor & catch financial anomalies, thereby reducing financial risk.

Our Financial Reporting Analysis Module provides more than 50 financial metrics and over 40 key reports to help organizations immediately begin reporting, analyzing, and monitoring financial information extracted from Socrate ERP or other ERP systems.

SocrateBI uses MicroStrategy 9.2.1a as development and production environment platform, allowing access to the latest features available in MicroStrategy platform: MicroStrategy Mobile, Transaction Services or Visual Insight.

BITSoftware continues to be faithful to its policy of providing complete integrated solutions for business management, designed to help companies activating in distribution, retail, construction, discrete manufacturing, professional services, agriculture, telco, food industry and auto dealers, by launching a new business solution: SocrateBI, a Business Intelligence solution that offers an increased flexibility in the decision making process and completes company`s business solutions range: Socrate+ ERP, SocrateOpen ERP&CRM and Socrate Payroll.

In their book, Larry Selden & Geoffrey Colvin uncover the trillion Dollar opportunity corporations are missing by not being able to clearly identify unprofitable customers.

Even in the most successful companies, while some customers can be very profitable others have a profound negative impact on the bottom line.