Business Intelligence (BI), software systems aimed to analyze almost any data (not only business), is important to any organization as part of strategic and tactical analysis and planning of future performance. The market offers a wide range of BI shelf solutionts. Excel, as available and flexible alternative, is a powerful tool for managing business intelligence data.
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Issue: the organization is looking for a business intelligence solution that will meet its business needs and reflect its unique processes.
Solution: Utilizing Office applications.
Advantage: flexibility, availability and cost-reduction
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Analysis of business results is a fundamental part of managing an organization's competitiveness and business continuity. Business intelligence means measuring performance along with internal and external financial and operational measurements to gain insight about the organization's status regarding its provided services and products. Organizing data to structured information and indicators helps to identify trends and market infrastructure, of a department or product, and sheds light on the organization's ability to continue to be a competitive factor.
Thorough analysis of business performance data requires unification/extraction of data from various sources such as ERP, CRM, SalesForce and others to allow a cross-section situation report. Excel is usually the last part of the analysis before the results are presented to policy makers. Typically, because of the high dynamism that has become an integral part of the competition, analysts need to explore new directions and trends that have not yet been investigated. Sometimes, there is no escape from using the available multi-functions in Excel to get insights. Excel allows great flexibility in data processing, but doing all the work manually without the use of advanced tools is expensive, inefficient and time-consuming. Automation of such processes allows more time for inspection and innovation on the basis of the results.
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Example: Combining data from different systems in order to obtain a business intelligence understanding of customers
Application: Excel System
Development model: Import of raw data from different systems, data processing and display in graphical form including historical trends
Result: Availability of a financial and operational report
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Using Excel as a platform for BI:
1) Receiving data from various data systems (SQL server, Analysis services, spreadsheets, text files ...)
2) Data processing
3) Using a graphical interface for issuing reports
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