Business Intelligence Tools are those software applications designed to process large amounts of information into specific summaries in order to present results which help us make sense of it all. In business we must operate on the latest information available. We need to consider as many variables as possible. And, while the Internet-based networks have made distributing and accessing data faster and simpler than ever, the challenge now is really to make sense of it all. We need tools to alert us to critical information.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) systems have been capturing incredible volumes of data for the past 30 years. Most likely there are relative "tons" of data currently available in your enterprise. But, if we think of each piece of data as a raw grain of rice we know each grain is valuable but has limited value in its raw state. To be useful rice needs to be collected, filtered, sorted, portioned, processed, cooked, mixed with other ingredients (business rules and logic), and presented in a way that is appealing. This is the same way data must be processed. It must be collected, extracted, transformed and loaded (ETL). Then selectively it must be filtered and aggregated into OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) datamarts, from which business intelligence tools can access and quickly present precise information in hot, attractive, delicious, and easy to digest portions.


SFT's Business Intelligence Tools

InControl is a "data warehouse" which goes beyond the capabilities other EIS systems. It was designed to provide executives with the timely and critical information needed to quickly evaluate the health of their business using all the information available within their ERP systems. Through the use of hundreds of key performance measurements trending charts, and drill-down details InControl delivers a tremendous advantage to decision makers in just minutes per day by:

• Automatically consolidating volumes of data into usable portions
• Making readily apparent positive/negative trends over 6 historic time periods
• Allowing decision makers to quickly ascertain appropriate correlated actions
• Building and maintaining a separate and selective data warehouse available as an enterprise information repository serving as the strong foundation to build upon advanced analytics, report serving, web-based queries, data mining and other business intelligence
• Providing the "Ultimate Electronic Scorecards" through four optional modules that leverage the power of Excel, allowing the decision maker to view the big picture yet drill down to the lowest level of details discovering root causes and actionable information

• A Comparative Measurement module which allows the web user to quickly compare key performance measures over multiple time periods to quickly determine performance growth or decline
• A Report Wizard to let users quickly define, run and save reports to be run immediately online, or offline, or automatically scheduled to run at regular intervals
• Quick configuration and customization of data subsets to meet the wide ranging needs of many target audiences

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