December 7, 2016 | Author: Nickolas Randall | Category: N/A
Business Intelligence Software Tools for Decision Support
Speaker: Rod van Buskirk Principal Consultant Westin Engineering
AWWA California-Nevada Section 2010 Annual Fall Conference, Sacramento, California
Acknowledgements
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Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility
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California Water Service Company
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Connexus Energy
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Denver Water
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Greenville Utilities Commission (North Carolina)
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Henrico County Dept. of Public Utilities (Virginia)
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Louisville Water Company
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Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago
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Santa Clara Valley Water District 2
Agenda
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Business Intelligence (BI) Defined
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Comparison of Core Utility Software Applications vs. Business Intelligence (BI) Software Applications
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Types of BI tools
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Capabilities of BI Software
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BI’s role in utility performance improvement
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Categories and BI system vendors
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Critical success factors in selecting BI Software 3
What is Business Intelligence, or BI?
Simply Put: Delivers the right information, at the right time, in the right format to guide your decisions. Three Parts: 1. Discipline of decision making 2. A class of Software 3. A Business Value
Discipline
Value Software
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What is Business Intelligence, or BI? Different Perspectives
Discipline Perspective: Integrated practices, enabled by specialized software, that support decision making at all levels to improve business and operations performance.
Software Perspective: Aggregates data from various business applications and delivers information in context of business and operational performance to enable collaboration, analysis and action.
Value Perspective: • Measure
effectiveness of strategies using operational data. • Deliver real-time information to guide daily decisions. • Monitor business processes and enable timely adjustments to improve efficiency and responsiveness.
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What’s the difference between core applications and business intelligence applications?
Core Utility Applications
Data
Business Intelligence Applications
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What’s the difference between core applications and business intelligence applications?
Core Utility Applications • Process transactions
Data
Business Intelligence Applications
• Automate workflows
• Generate Information to support decision making
• Generate data – lots of data
• Streamline performance management • Generate graphs, forecasts, trends and reports
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What types of Business Intelligence Software tools are commonly used?
Core Utility Applications
Data
Business Intelligence Applications
• Customer Service & Billing • Finance /Accounting • Human Resources • Purchasing/Inventory Management • Capital Program Mgmt. • Asset Management • Maintenance Management • Operations Control
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What types of Business Intelligence Software tools are commonly used?
Core Utility Applications
Data
Business Intelligence Applications
• Customer Service & Billing
• Management Reports
• Finance /Accounting
• Performance Scorecards
• Human Resources
• Alerts & Notifications
• Purchasing/Inventory Management
• Report Graphics & Drill-Downs
• Capital Program Mgmt.
• Analytics and Trending
• Asset Management
• Forecasting/Projections
• Maintenance Management
• Simulation/Modeling
• Operations Control
• Data Mining
• Management Dashboards
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What are the capabilities of specialized Business Intelligence Software?
Dashboards & Scorecards
Supervisors
Department Heads
Analysts
General Managers 10
Business Intelligence Dashboards:
Monitoring Business & Operational Performance
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How do BI Systems support utility performance improvements? REPORT Operational Reports Financial Reports Performance Reports
MONITOR
ANALYZE
Dashboards Alerts Scorecards
Root Causes Exceptions Trends
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How do BI Systems support utility performance improvements? •
REPORT Operational Reports Financial Reports Performance Reports
MONITOR
ANALYZE
Dashboards Alerts Scorecards
Root Causes Exceptions Trends
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•
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Customer Service & Billing • Customer Problem Resolution • Meter to Cash Maintenance • Work Backlog • Outage Durations Operations • Water Source Mixing • Energy Costs Finance / Budgeting • Budget Shifts • Budget to Actuals 13
How do BI Systems support utility performance improvements? Gaps with traditional, Excel-based reporting
REPORT Operational Reports Financial Reports Performance Reports
MONITOR
ANALYZE
Dashboards Alerts Scorecards
Root Causes Exceptions Trends
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Inadequate data controls or data quality management
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Manual data imports
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Excel not designed to be a data warehouse or a BI tool!
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BUT…Excel, in conjunction with a sound BI approach, is a very good software tool for analysis and trending 14
What are the key factors for selecting the bestfit Business Intelligence Software Tools? User Scale Departmental
Functionality Embedded BI
Report Developers
High
OLAP Ad Hoc Query
Power User Utility-wide
BI Spreadsheets
(Analysts)
Dashboards & Scorecards
Casual User (Executive, Manager, Front-line worker)
End-user Reports (Interactive, drill)
Production Reports
Customers / Suppliers / Regulators External
(invoices, statements, static)
Low
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Who are the BI software vendors?
Tier 1 Software Vendors – offering complete “BI Suites” – targeting larger organizations Oracle BI • IBM / Cognos • SAP / Business Objects •
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Who are the BI software vendors?
Tier 2 Software Vendors – targeting mid-sized organizations • •
Older, long-term market presence – MicroStrategy, Actuate, among others New market players – LogiXML, QlikView, Pentaho, JasperSoft, PivotLink, among others
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Who are the software vendors?
Microsoft • • • •
Continues to expand its BI capabilities – moving from being a Tier 3 to a Low-End Tier 2 vendor Currently - unconnected, un-integrated, software tools Large database market share; strong data warehousing capabilities The #1 Analysis and Reporting software tool – Microsoft Excel
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Who are the software vendors?
Software as a Service (SaaS) Business Intelligence • • •
SaaS Advantages • • • • •
Online web applications – over the Internet Leased per user or fully hosted off-site Utility pays an annual fee for the online service
No need to maintain internal hardware and software Automatic upgrades Supports utilities with no internal IT staff Off-loads tasks from internal IT staff Provides more flexibility
Vendors offering SaaS BI Tools • •
Tier 1 Vendors – SAP, Oracle, IBM Tier 2 Vendors – PivotLink, JasperSoft, Pentaho, LogiXML, QlikView
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What are the critical success factors for selecting appropriate BI software? •
Obtain executive commitment; focus on the key management trending needs
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Create an executive vision for Business Intelligence
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Assess high-level business requirements for BI
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Formulate a broad-based plan for deploying BI software solutions – with timeline & budget estimates
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Identify a short list of BI vendors appropriate to the business requirements
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Issue RFP to short list; review proposals and scripted demos based on specific solution needs
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Thank You
Contact: Rod van Buskirk Westin Engineering Inc. 3100 Zinfandel Drive Rancho Cordova, CA 95670 Cell: (916) 803-5132 email:
[email protected] Get presentation and other insight: http://www.we-inc.com/Library