Managing Automation - December 2007 - (Page 27) portals and role-based user interfaces where operational users live. Microsoft, for example, has begun to upgrade its business application suites, such as Dynamics AX and GP, with portal-based user interfaces that are tailored for specific roles in the enterprise and feature contextual BI. Among the 50 roles that Microsoft has so far identified are operational titles, such as warehouse manager and production manager. At the same time, Microsoft is in“When operational people need to ask a tegrating BI, business monitorvisualization caquestion, they need the answer immedi- ing/alerting, and into its business pabilities directly ately and they need it in a form they can applications. The company’s requickly digest.” — Doug Lawson, Incuity cently announced PerformancePoint Ser ver 2007, which supports anaas traditional BI environments do, EII systems lytics, visualization, and business monitorprovide real-time access to data residing in ing and alerting, is now being integrated transactional systems, as needed by end users. with Dynamics AX. Since EII systems don’t aggregate and replicate “It used to be that ERP was one product the data held in source systems, they typically and BI was another, and users would have to deliver fresher, more up-to-date data. copy and paste between them. Now it’s being One vendor of such EII tools is Composite integrated so that an order scheduler might Software Inc., a San Mateo, CA, startup that be looking at a number of activities from the provides services-based data virtualization softERP application alongside KPIs that are relware that integrates with analytical tools from evant on his home page,” says Mogens Elstraditional BI vendors, such as Cognos, Busiberg, general manager of dynamics ERP proness Objects, and Microstrategy. According gram management at Microsoft. to Peter Tran, vice president of product marAnd enterprise applications giant SAP is keting at Composite, manufacturers are using moving in the same direction. In October, the the company’s EII tools to track processes, such as order fulfillment and multi-party inventory management, in real time. Other EII tool providers include Information Builders, with its recently acquired iWay product; Attunity Ltd.; and Business Objects. MANY HAPPY RETURNS collection and analysis of real-time data from multiple sources. EII middleware tools sit between a wide variety of source systems, such as ERP or control systems, and end-user tools, such as analytical software. They combine connectors to source systems with metadata repositories that provide context for understanding data from different sources. Rather than aggregating and moving large amounts of historical data to a data warehouse the bottom line FRESH DATA, AS YOU NEED IT But, in order to meet the needs of managers on the operational front lines, operational BI needs to do more than just surface real-time data. It also needs to present that data in the right form and context so that operational managers can easily understand and act on it. “When operational people need to ask a question, they need the answer immediately, and they need it in a form they can quickly digest,” says Doug Lawson, CEO at Incuity Software Inc., a maker of real-time manufacturing intelligence software. “If they don’t get that, they’ll quickly move on to the next problem.” Incuity, for example, presents manufacturing intelligence information in formats with which engineers and others on the front lines are familiar, such as x-y plots and time series trend charts. And ERP vendors such as Microsoft and SAP are going further, integrating BI into What have been/will be the biggest benefits your company receives from a business intelligence/performance management expansion? Better insight into operational performance 54% Better insight into financial performance 39% Easy-to-consume metrics about business performance 36% One source of truth for company performance 33% Personalized content for information consumers based on responsibility and areas of interest 26% Lower IT costs of information access and analysis 25% Source: AMR Research 27 December 2007
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.