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The environment around us is changing fast. The amount of information increases. Many of them are related to business, many are personal, but all of them are important. And managing all this information became very difficult. Furthermore, the collaboration is a key element in today’s business. And since the Internet is everywhere, our expectation is to make the data available anytime and anywhere, in order to act quickly, but in a secure environment.

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.

We just released the new 2011.11 version of Socrate+ ERP, which includes more enhancements, especially for companies that activate in Services, Distribution and Retail industries.

Socrate+ 2011.11 includes a complex „Projects” functionality, which allows companies working on projects to plan and track execution of projects, from the financial point of view, on any of their phases. Detailed planning of each step/action/resource, and monitoring the execution of an action are managed by specific Project Management software, Socrate+ 2011.11 allowing the integration with such solutions.

Socrate+ 2011.11 supports also the retail and distribution companies, providing mechanisms that automate the printing process of shelf price labels directly from a reception, that generate internal bar-codes and clear the warehouses in case of transfer or restructuring.

For more information about our new version of Socrate+ ERP you can read the press release.

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.

BITSoftware released earlier this week the new 11.11 version of its payroll solution, SocratePayroll, which contains enhancements in employees records, wages calculation and reporting areas.

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.

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: