Business Intelligence Applications Will Be A Part Of Daily Life

Hakan Çelebi, IAS Software Management Applications Unit Manager, answered the questions about business intelligence, one of the most important agenda items of the last period. Saying “Business intelligence applications will be a part of daily life,” Çelebi also explained the advantages of business intelligence application canias IQ offered in caniasERP to companies.

What is business intelligence? What is business analytics?
In short, business intelligence (BI) is a system that enables businesses to create dashboards and data visualizations by combining raw data from internal and external sources for analysis and decision support. BI is also a set of tools, practices and methodologies that turn data into information, aiming businesses to take the right steps at the right time and make strategic and tactical decisions correctly. Business analytics is a business planning that aims to improve business processes and increase profitability by increasing the access of data to businesses. Business analytics works by including engineering solutions such as business intelligence tools, as well as all kinds of unstructured data sources, predictive modeling, optimization, simulation and automated decision systems.

What is the main purpose of business intelligence and business analytics? What are the components of business intelligence?
Business intelligence applications include basic business intelligence components such as data source (data warehouse), ETL, analytical data model (OLAP), reporting interface (Dashboard and required administrative interfaces). The first of the business intelligence components are data warehouses. These are structures that are created to avoid the fatigue of databases, run faster and store less data. Another important component is the concept of ETL (Extract-Transform-Load & Extract-Transform-Load). These are the processes that protect the accuracy of the data received from different data sources, clear the excesses in the data, eliminate the deficiencies, transform each data into a suitable data type that can be used in inquiries and transfer to the data warehouse. Another concept, OLAP, is the structure that allows businesses to analyze their data in a multi-dimensional, faster and interactive way. Our last component is the reporting interfaces where we begin to see the results of the business intelligence process and where the reports meet the end users as output.

We Respond to the Needs of the Firms with caniasIQ

What features should business intelligence solutions and applications have? What solutions do you offer with caniasERP?
In caniasERP, we provide reports and visual analysis that process raw data into information and enable action to be taken in light of this information. Apart from all these ERP solutions; In order to provide better performance and analytical results in cases where the volume and complexity of the data increase, we offer canias IQ application, which is a business intelligence tool that can work within the system. As a result of our business partnership with Qlik Sense, one of the world's leading business intelligence manufacturers, we have developed canias IQ, which operates within caniasERP and includes all the advantages of caniasERP and Qlik Sense products. We can list the main possible features of business intelligence solutions and applications as using data sources, in-memory analysis, multi-dimensional viewing, integration, easy reporting and mobile access. If we briefly explain these:

Use of Data Sources
The first step towards visualizing the data and turning it into information is actually the process of extracting the business data to be used from external sources, cleaning, merging, converting and loading the data according to business processes. With the applications included in caniasERP, ERP data can be easily transferred to the data warehouse by passing ETL processes without the need for a third party ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tool.

In-memory analysis
Business Intelligence application Qlik Sense's in-memory working technology keeps the entire dataset subject to the analysis in memory, reducing the analysis of the end users to seconds and gaining speed. In other words, it returns the query result made by the user just by clicking on the data set previously stored in the memory without going to the source of that data. Considering the large data sets from millions of rows of data sources, such a technology makes a huge difference for the instant calculations the user needs in terms of speed.

Multi-Dimensional View of Data
canias IQ applications format business’ critical data in a standard and structured format and provide it to users in multiple dimensions for an efficient analytical query. The ability to look at the data in multiple dimensions gives flexibility to the prepared reports and provides unlimited cross reporting.

Integration
The full integration of the Business Intelligence application with ERP systems is very important. From the caniasERP system, dashboard and other reports prepared with Qlik Sense can be accessed directly without the need for third party applications. Thanks to the developed bidirectional integration, business intelligence reports can be accessed via caniasERP modules, as well as the details of a striking situation or record can be accessed with one click via caniasERP modules.

Easy Reporting (Easy visualization by drag and drop)
Thanks to the OLAP tables that are designed according to the needs, the relationships between the tables are automatically established without the need to design OLAP cubes. The Association technology, which is included in the business intelligence application Qlik Sense, allows analysis as the human brain thinks and offers a highly flexible query to the user. Apart from the questions asked, the results of other analyzes that may be simultaneously relevant can be reflected on the screens, by keeping the available data in a relational way. With the self-service feature, users can make changes to existing dashboard screens, analysis, or easily create new screens with drag and drop from scratch.

Mobile Access
Busy executives always on the move want easy access to management information from their mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets. Therefore, it is very important to access business intelligence solutions from mobile devices. Through webclient application, caniasERP can be easily accessed from mobile devices and business intelligence reports can be viewed using canias IQ.

Ready Reports
It brings great advantage to have ready-to-use template reports available within the  businesses as soon as canias IQ is installed.

Business Intelligence Applications Bring Firms an Advantage

Why do businesses need business intelligence?
Enterprises have to identify important events and to identify / monitor business trends and to operate their decision mechanisms without error in order to adapt rapidly to changing environments and market conditions. Business intelligence applications enable accurate reports from data sources and real-time monitoring of businesses. In this context, business intelligence informs managers about what has happened from the past to the present and helps them to make strategic and tactical decisions accurately and quickly by providing accurate data to predict the future. It is not possible to access all structural and non-structural data of the previous periods on Big Data for operational or decision support system purposes. In order to determine a more effective and efficient strategy, business intelligence is needed to access all the mentioned data.

What are the benefits of business intelligence to businesses?
Business intelligence tools are essential for businesses to compete, maximize revenue streams and be sustainable. Some of the benefits that business intelligence software can provide to any business; turning data into actionable information, improving data quality, providing faster and more accurate reporting, analysis and planning, providing multidimensional reporting, supporting more accurate decisions, increasing the speed of decision-making, ensuring early detection of risks, increasing user satisfaction, gaining sales and market intelligence, helping to determine market trends and enabling optimization of business processes.

What will be the vision for the future in business intelligence applications?
Digitization is being used in all areas of life, the importance of this is increasing day by day. Data sets continue to expand at an unprecedented rate. This expansion produces huge volumes of data. Today, artificial intelligence systems are used to interpret big data and make various inferences. As artificial intelligence systems become smarter and gain the ability to learn on their own, banking, financial services, insurance, retail, hospitality, engineering, production and similar applications created by these systems are being released. The concepts of deep learning, neural networks and the Internet of Things can be counted among other concepts that we will encounter in business intelligence systems in the future.