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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.

Since MicroStrategy is primarily consumed via the Web, there is a unique opportunity to embed some extra value by slipping HTML into little pockets of a report. While the HTML Container for Documents is obviously designed to do just that, you can also sneak it into Attributes which can help solve some pretty neat problems. Today I'll talk about how HTML Attributes work and a few use cases.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal is a free service that lets you visualize your data easily. MicroStrategy Cloud Personal uses MicroStrategy’s fast, reliable and secure Cloud Intelligence infrastructure. There is no software to install or manage. You can upload and analyze your data in minutes. No more waiting for support from your IT department!

With MicroStrategy Cloud Personal you’re up and running in a few clicks. Anyone can do it. And more important, you’re in control. Cause Cloud Personal is 100% self-service: no lines, no waiting, and no back-and-forth with IT.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal is also smarter than a spreadsheet. With just a few clicks, you can apply the power of visual intelligence to your data – graph it, slice it, filter it. With Cloud Personal, you can publish your dashboard to a blog or share it using Facebook or Twitter.

So, take a look and make Business Intelligence personal!

And if you are interested, you can register for a live webinar on Wednesday, November 2.

Beyond all disputes related to BI tools implementation success or failure, beyond the discussions about how flexible or inflexible is a BI solution, one thing can be certainty stated: business intelligence can do a lot of great things for organisations.

MicroStrategy Mobile for Android was released last Friday. I know the majority of smartphone users are on the Android platform. To that end, there's already been some good information made available, so I wanted to collect it and share it here.
There was some good information in this forum post:
Useful tech notes:

MicroStrategy World is the annual user group conference hosted by MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy 2012 will be the 6th conference I've attended and it remains to be the highlight of my year. There are incredible opportunities for education and networking, as well as whetting your appetite for future MicroStrategy enhancements. I'll discuss some of the many benefits of the conference to help convince you to attend if you've never been, and help unearth some annual gems of the show if you've been in the past and aren't sure if there's anything more for you. I learn an incredible amount every year, and some would say I'm already pretty knowledgable in all things MicroStrategy.

During my years of industrial marketing and sales, I learned that there is a big difference between corporate information and Strategic Knowledge. Corporate information usually consists of internal raw data while Strategic Knowledge is the business wisdom necessary to achieve profitable growth consistently. Although internal data is necessary to manage logistic or tactical areas like, supply chain, manufacturing, accounts receivable, transportation, accounts payable or customer service; it’s far from enough to perform marketing and sales management jobs effectively, namely increasing market share, revenue and ultimately net profit.

The reason is simple, internal data is a by-product of the order entry system (ERP), designed to ship orders on time; not to build a strategic data base for marketing use.

Unfortunately, most Business Intelligence (BI) implementations populate sophisticated BI software with just internal raw data from the ERP.

This is only half of the story because ERP data does not usually contain competitive or market intelligence. This is the reason why BI usually does not provide the immediate strategic analysis and direction necessary to grow the businesses, leaving Marketing and Sales teams struggling to find the information they need to increase profitability.

Typically, after Sales or Marketing run BI reports several times and they keep seeing the wrong structure or hierarchy in their customers, markets, segments and territories, they stop using BI and continue making decisions the old fashion way: based on intuition.

by Bill Cabiro and Strat-Wise LLC

„Please visit their web site at www.strat-wise.com for additional articles and resources on the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Analytics”