Technology everywhere is transforming businesses. From filling cola bottles to flying an aeroplane, most processes in them are automated. Organizations whether ISV or their bigger counterparts are interested to streamline processes, increase efficiencies and boost productivity. Wherever there is technology, data comes along with it. The best thing about data: It can offer a wealth of critical/business information. Ref: http://itcube.net/downloads/whitePapers/How%20Business%20Intelligence%20(BI)%20Solution%20helps%20companies%20%20reduce%20time%20spent%20on%20data%20manipulation.pdf

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How Business Intelligence (BI) Solution
helps Companies reduce time spent on
Data Manipulation

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How Business Intelligence (BI) Solution helps companies reduce time
spent on data manipulation
Technology everywhere is transforming businesses. From filling cola bottles to flying an aeroplane,
most processes in them are automated. Organizations whether ISV or their bigger counterparts are
interested to streamline processes, increase efficiencies and boost productivity. Wherever there is
technology, data comes along with it. The best thing about data: It can offer a wealth of
critical/business information.
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Cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) is projected to grow from $.75B in 2013 to $2.94B in 2018,
attaining a CAGR of 31%. -Roundup of Analytics, Big Data & Business Intelligence Forecasts And
Market Estimates, 2014
Wondering!! How filling cola bottles can offer valuable business insights?
Yes, filling cola bottles offers vital business insights that transforms and adapts cola plants for years
to come. Most cola plants today are equipped with completely automated packaging lines. Definitely
these packaging lines will have automated dispensers and fillers. These put precise amount of cola
into bottles. Certainly dispensers and fillers have a business logic written in them to perform
functions precisely. In terms of Business intelligence, the dispensers, fillers and production
monitoring systems are data sources. From these data sources, manufacturers can gain insights. BI
provides granular details of bottling processes.
Few examples of parameters, BI offers about the bottling process.
• Number of bottles filled per minute
• Quantity per bottle. There can be very minute difference in quantity per each bottle.
• Time taken to fill each bottle.
These parameters mainly talk about production efficiency. BI can generate reports and data
visualizations that track, monitor, and evaluate the packaging lines. These reports will help to
identify bottlenecks and issues in real-time. By knowing these parameters, manufacturers can
further refine and optimize their production processes. Most of the parameters are directly linked to
procurement and will influence the complete supply-chain of the bottling processes. BI can be
further tightly integrated with multiple systems to create extensively detailed dashboards. Such
dashboards offer complete overview and end-to-end information of the bottling plant in real time.
Note: Bottling plant is taken as a sample reference. BI is extensively used across domains plus cross-
functional domains. Imagine How BI works in Aircraft /Airline organizations.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2014/06/24/roundup-of-analytics-big-data-business-
intelligence-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2014/

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Can we do more with BI rather than monitoring, identifying and eliminating
bottlenecks??
With data by its side, BI offers a plenty of insights. We can do much more than gathering metrics and
insights. BI allows to model data in multiple ways, depicts various business scenarios. Most
commonly modelled scenarios have been the best and worst scenarios.
By depicting various business scenarios, organizations will be ready to adapt and align themselves to
different operating conditions and frequencies. Learn how to refine and optimize the operations
based on these scenarios. Essentially, predict and forecast to foresee the future. And then adapt the
business according to it.
But how do you Model data or depict various business scenarios?? The answer is Data
Manipulation: Transform and manipulate the business data and metrics to depict various business
scenarios.
Even before explaining How Data Manipulation is done and its benefits. Let us know what
happens when BI is done manually.
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Almost half the companies (45 percent) fill reporting needs through manual extraction and data
cleansing tools, feeding the information to spreadsheets or PDF formats.
BI systems and tools allow organizations to seamlessly consolidate data from multiple sources.
Earlier Orga izatio s would a uall gather, o solidate, a d tra sfor data . Further with the
transformed data, reports were generated manually. This meant employees spending hours
together to perform BI related actions, such as data entry. A lot of manual interventions attract
repetitions and duplications. Imagine each department of an organization generating its own version
of report, each version narrating a half-baked story. At this point BI becomes very lengthy and
laborious process. Such that organizations will have tough time while making effective and
consistent decisions.
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74% of non-adopting organizations are negatively impacted: Companies that do not take advantage
of business intelligence software must rely on data that is manually assembled. For reporting alone,
this is both time-consuming and prone to human error. - 7 Business Intelligence Stats That Will
Surprise You
Why spend time doing things manually: BI tools can do it all.
Business Intelligence tools help model data for various scenarios at ease. In BI, the data is gathered,
cleansed, structured and then analysed. To manipulate data in BI, one needs to tweak the numbers
and metrics accordingly. This allows organizations predict, visualize and plan for other scenarios.
When data manipulation is done manually, most of the time is spent copying and editing data at all
points, also involving manual calculations. While in BI, most of the work around data is performed
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2014/07/30/business-intelligence-bi-isnt-very-intelligent-yet/
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http://www.bisoftwareinsight.com/business-intelligence-stats/

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behind the scenes/ in the backend. BI is then ready to generate the dashboards and reports based
on the data gathered from different systems. Now the stage is set, to model data by keying in the
value/number in a single data point. This automatically transforms the values at all other data points
depending on the keyed value.
With transformed business data, BI generates dashboards and reports for the designed data model.
Further organizations can draw comparisons between various data models. And they will have
greater visibility on impact of business processes with reference to multiple data models. These
attributes and insights also influence Total cost of ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI).
B o ti ui g the ola ottli g e a ple, let’s u dersta d how data manipulation works. Based on
the emerging trends, the cola manufacturer understands the demand for mini cola bottles. The
packaging lines are designed to manufacture bigger cola bottles. Now in order to align and adapt the
packaging lines for mini bottles, a series of precise changes is required.
With BI at helm, the manufacturer just needs to modify the value of the quantity per bottle. The BI
tool will start manipulating the quantity in terms of time required to fill each bottle and the precise
amount of sugar, water, and cola syrups to be put into mini bottles. And generate dashboards and
data visualizations. These giving complete business information for the mini bottle manufacturing. BI
equips the cola manufacturer with right business information.
Data warehousing and ETL lifecycle
If the same activity had to be performed manually minus BI and data manipulation, it would take at
least few months to get up and running. Minus BI, a lot of trial and error runs would have to be
conducted affecting production. A huge number of manual changes would have to be done at all
systems. The number of permutations and combinations of these changes would be very high.

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The whole process of redesigning the packaging lines to accommodate mini bottles becomes
complex and tiresome.
With BI and precise information at hand, the manufacturer needs to set the required values at each
system and run a few trials. To get up and running with mini bottles. Not that perfection is achieved
at once, but the number of trials is reduced by a greater margin. The manufacturer can also explore
the possibilities of further optimizing the packaging lines.
Leverage and Manipulate data: For a better tomorrow
Another example of leveraging BI is Saudi Airlines:
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Saudi Airlines, implemented a business intelligence (BI) solution with Microsoft Corp. that includes
Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Power BI for Office 365, Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft SharePoint
Server 2013 to analyse, visualize and share data in a unified way, which allows the company to have
better business visibility, more engaged employees, and projected savings of millions of dollars per
year in the process.
It is time for organization to leverage BI and harness business information. Business intelligence
helps organizations to make quick and informed decisions. An effective decision paves way for
continuous growth and sustainability. Data manipulation helps organizations to look at themselves
at various stages or in the coming years.
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http://news.microsoft.com/2014/08/14/saudi-airlines-flies-high-by-improving-its-business-intelligence-with-
microsoft/