The Challenge

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, organizations need their teams to make good decisions and to make them quickly.  A good decision is one that is informed; that is, based on accurate information not just data.  While making decisions quickly may have different criteria in different organizations, imagine that a Director of Operations needs to make a decision now and has to wait for reports to be compiled and correlated before they have access to good information - the window of opportunity may pass them by!

To beat your competition, you need good information now. 

The Solution

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is an excellent framework for building Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for you organization.  BI provides insight into the raw data that is often stored in databases, spreadsheets, and other 3rd-party systems.  Bringing that data together and organizing it into sortable, filterable, and meaning information is the goal of BI. Putting that into the hands of all your users is the goal of SharePoint BI!

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides many features that support BI:

• Business Connectivity Services (BCS) – allows you to connect to external systems and data sources (e.g. SAP)
• Excel Services – Perhaps the most commonly used BI tool on the planet, Excel is everywhere.  SharePoint Excel Services helps you centralize “everywhere” and make it accessible to everyone.
• PerformancePoint Services (PPS) – Formerly a stand-alone product, PPS allows you to build KPIs, graphs, scorecards, and dashboards to display high-level, business critical information within SharePoint.
• PowerPivot – A new offering from Microsoft, PowerPivot adds functionality to Excel and SharePoint to enable users to build powerful pivot charts and tables without the need for expensive data warehouses (i.e. OLAP cubes)

Powerful dashboards can be built and displayed within SharePoint by team members using familiar tools and skills.  Need to visualize sales by state?  Use Visio Services in SharePoint to help display the information in an easy to understand way.

Not sure how to take advantage of SharePoint and leverage Business Intelligence to identify crucial opportunities or trends?  Call X-ISS today to see how you can benefit by using SharePoint and Business Intelligence to give your decision makers good information now.

Visit our SharePoint page to find out more!