The finance department is a powerful agent of organisational change because it sits at the information nexus of the organisation. The information it collects can be leveraged to assist management to make strategic decisions, avert potential risks and optimise key processes.
However, most finance executives are forced to spend too much time producing mundane internal financial and statutory reports, leaving very little time to analyse the data and collaborate with top management about strategies in improving business. In most cases, the process of producing standard reports creates information silos and this in turn limits the ability of top executives from getting a precise and consistent view of the company performance.
But this trend is fast changing. Forward thinking organisations have learnt to partner with the IT department or the Business Intelligence team and produce more meaningful performance statistics. This is definitely a smart move. However, the BI team still needs to create a data warehousing environment that contains all data from various sources the finance department needs, with the appropriate rules and formulas applied.
A really smart move would be if the top management executives are themselves empowered to explore company data any which way they prefer, with very minimum or zero assistance from the IT department or the BI team. Once the BI team delivers a solid infrastructure, the end users should be able to quickly and easily analyse data all by themselves through a simple drag and drop method without the need for any complex calculations or programming.
Well, this is possible now! Olympic Software introduces a brand new additional offering to our Business Intelligence suite of products and services. “BOARD” has been selected to complete our Business Intelligence offering.
BOARD offers enhanced functionality and provides a very effective presentation platform suitable for operational, CFO and CEO roles. BOARD also excels where complex calculations are required and enhancing “what if” scenario views of data. BOARD and our existing BI360 offering could well serve together.
BOARD is a unique product, based on an abstraction rooted in a profound knowledge of organisational and management needs. In addition to simple reporting, analysis and data navigation (normally referred to as Business Intelligence), BOARD models information and processes to perform advanced simulations and help answer predictive-type questions. This can all be carried out without any programming and with total adaptation to any company structure and size.
BOARD heralds a new category of products, designed to place technology at the service of management needs: Management Intelligence Toolkits. Due to BOARD’s exceptional ease of use, costs associated with application development, maintenance, and user training are extremely low.
Here are just some examples of Board’s many uses:
- Sales analysis
- Sales planning and rolling forecasts
- Market analysis integrating internal and external data
- Financial reporting, financial budgeting and planning
- Statutory and management financial consolidation
- Sales force support systems
- Human resource appraisal models
- Service level and orders management cycle analysis
- Customers ranking models
- Planning and production (including sales budget, stock, and production capacity)
- Activity Based costing models for product or customer profitability analysis
Talk to our new team member for BOARD; Santosh Chandran.
Santosh Chandran is the Business Development Manager for BOARD Management Intelligence at Olympic Software. He regularly blogs about business intelligence and corporate performance management. You can follow him on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Please contact him directly if you would like to find out how BOARD can improve your business results through better decision making, phone 09 980 3964 or email: santoshc@olympic.co.nz
