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The success of an organization depends on the method and speed of responding to changing market conditions. Therefore, Business Intelligence is often defined as the array of processes and technologies that turn information into insight and action, to effectively understand, predict, optimize, and prepare to take action upon current and future business activity.

BI applications find their way into a vast range of business areas including CRM, ERP, financial management, etc. They employ technologies such as: data mining, text mining, geographic information systems, language translation, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, simulation, and advanced visualization.

After years of data center growth and IT evolution, many businesses are left living with complex, overgrown computing platforms that are chronically underutilized. These systems take up valuable data center floor space, depreciate quickly, consume large amounts of power and cooling resources, and can cause management headaches. Plus, this rigid architecture makes it hard for an IT organization to quickly adapt or respond to changing business demands, and it makes it difficult to share resources throughout an enterprise, in order to increase utilization and improve efficiency.

By providing resources as a service, cloud computing addresses these fundamental data center challenges. Some examples of applications include software as a service (SaaS), Customer Relationship Management, file storage, file synchronization and file back-up. It's now possible for businesses to have their own private cloud, which incorporates specific services and is only accessible to specific people.

Organizations gain a competitive advantage when they can increase the sophistication of their BI applications. One way to achieve this is to move beyond basic historical reporting and evolve to strategic, predictive analytics and alerts that help anticipate the likelihood of a future event, such as customer churn. Your business are as full of information like the DNA, and precious as gold. All you have to do is learning how to discover them. And use them. And with MicroStrategy Data mining and predictive analysis you can extract everything that is valuable from your data.

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.

Therefore, controlling stock levels and cost of stock purchases is essential to keep your business moving forward. Inventory is like cash! Having a tight grip on your stock levels helps you improve the efficiency of your logistics and reduce operational costs. For many businesses, inventory is a significant part of their working capital. So optimized stock levels have a huge impact on their financing costs.

SocrateBI`s new module - „Inventory and Stock Analysis Module” (ISAM) - enables retailers and distributors to analyze in minutes volumes of transactional data and gain vital intelligence on essential areas such as sales trends, stocks and inventory management, in order to help your business grow. With ISAM, you will be able to gain a better insight into inventory levels, stocks and sales performance, providing the best selection of products and services that customers like and want. This insight is giving decision makers a better understanding of sales trends, in order to improve product sales and profitability.

ISAM`s excellent reporting and analytical features allow you to analyze lots of data, in an easy and intuitive way, and to make critical inquiries at different levels, supporting your decisions with efficacy. The module includes a series of important reports, such as: Average quantity sold for days with stock, Date of Last Sale for Products with Stock = 0 in the last 30 days, Item Sales vs. Stock, Products with Stock without Sales, etc. And, there is a report template included, allowing the user to select his own attributes, metrics and filters that will appear in the final report.

Below are the most significant benefits of using SocrateBI ISAM module:

• allows you to focus quickly on those areas that result in profit by giving you the ability to monitor stock products without sales, in order to avoid financial blockages due to purchasing of products difficult to sell.
• allows you to more effectively monitor and manage inventory levels, so that you will be able to identify revenue enhancement and cost reduction opportunities.
• improved sales and gross margins, by having each store or warehouse stocked with the right combination of products, at the right time.
• improved merchandising decisions, that help you more proactively serve your customers.

The ISAM module was added to the already existing SocrateBI`s modules launched in November 2011: FRAM (Financial Reporting Analysis Module), PCAM (Project Controlling Analysis Module) and SCAM (Sales and Customer Analysis Module).

BITSoftware`s Business Intelligence solution – SocrateBI -, is developed having as a base the MicroStrategy platform, MicroStrategy being the largest independent provider of Business Intelligence solutions in the world. SocrateBI allows organizations to run packaged analytics directly from Socrate ERP, or, due to its open interfaces and connectors, analysis can be done also using the information available in other ERP systems.

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.

„How can we optimize customer profitability?” „How can we control marketing campaign ROI?” „Who are the customers that make multiple purchases?” „Why have we lost some high value customers?” Those are just a few questions to which sales people and marketers must answer. In order to give answers, they must capture many different types of customer data: attitudinal, behavioral, transactional, and more. But all those data must be analyzed in order to achieve a customer behavior understanding.

When we talk about analytic process, we mean two levels: historical and predictive. Provided by OLAP cubes, historical analysis is an important component of customer understanding, revealing past customers activity.

Instead, predictive analytics provides a clear picture of what is going to happen, enabling marketers and sales person to understand the key factors that drive customer value and loyalty, and attract more customers. That is what SocrateBI’s Sales and Customer Analysis Module (SCAM) does.

Based on information provided by SCAM, the marketers and sales people can:

- understand and define customer behaviors;

- identify customer demographics;

- monitor shopping habits;

- identify product preferences.

- identifying the appropriate target audience and products for designing cross sell campaigns

- identify products with increasing/decreasing revenue

- identify potential products, that can be used for a cross sell campaign

- what percent of customers contribute the top 10% of profits in a given month

- analyze quantities, revenue and operating margin for two periods of time

- see how revenues and discounts are divided amongst items

- identify sold quantities and sales value of agents per week

- emphasizes the monthly trend of the Operating Revenue

- identify product category contribution to operating revenue

And all those in order to develop targeted offers and match a specific offer to a specific individual.

They can also manage customers information to create and execute marketing campaigns, knowing which messages and offers to send, to whom and when to send them. They can also forecast campaign ROI by measuring & extrapolating campaign results in real-time of previous similar campaigns & similar target market.

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.