Business decision support systems

Task 1: Business decision support systems
Business Decisions and Support Types
Decision making is undertaken at hierarchy’s all levels. So, it is crucial to gain knowledge
regarding the decision types being supported by a decision support system.
 Strategic Decisions: These decisions need lots of time to reach at and have non-recurrent
nature as they are not linked to an organization’s general functioning. Undertaken by the
hierarchy’s top level, these include a careful examination of the circumstances and
outcomes. Examples may include: investment proposal examination, decisions in respect
to mergers & acquisitions, funding or allocation of resources.
 Operational Decisions: There are 2 major categories to such decisions. Firstly, decision
making related to production volume, distribution channels as well as policies, location of
plant fall under the top mgt. Being long-term decisions, they have a direct influence on
the business’ operations. Secondly, decisions related to daily operations are undertaken
by the lower/middle level managers.
 Managerial decisions: Made by top + upper middle level of mgt., such decisions are
related to R&D, resource allocation, introduction of new product, withdrawal of old
products, talent mgt.
A unique support level is needed by every decision. Therefore, it is the duty of a decision support
analyst to examine the various kinds of decisions that are required to be supported, people who
are a part of decision-making process, whether or not there is a need of presenting other COAs.
Key features of how business intelligence work
Depending on particular industry and circumstances, different organizations make investment in
a BI solution for varied reasons. Irrespective of the separate agenda, below we are mentioning 6
features which must be targeted in any specific BI solution, regardless of the situations of its
applications:
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Task 2: Business intelligence, tools and technologies
BI is defined as a collection of technologies, practices and applications that can be used for
collecting, integrating, analyzing and presenting the business data. Supporting better business
decisions is the purpose of BI. BI is a data driven decision support system.
The tools and technologies of BI are explained below.
1. Executive dashboards
Business leaders get crucial, easy to understand real-time data with the help of Customized
Dashboards. Along with minimizing the response times to external/internal events, it supports a
quicker and improved decision making. Personalized dashboards are required by the executives
so as to get easily understood KPIs as well as summary info regularly on set schedules.
2. Location Intelligence
Location Intelligence can be known as the ability of mapping as well as visualizing data in
certain geographical formats. In order to gain knowledge of their business operations from latest
perspectives (like sales per region), it is crucial to explore and visualize the data sets on the basis
of geographical elements.
3. “What if” analysis
For assessing the possible impacts of the critical business decision prior to actually undertaking
them, the businesses can refer to the “What if” analysis. For gaining the business targets as well
as avoiding the primary approach of “hit and miss”, users can devise strategies by utilizing the
present data. By this, the mgt. can perform precise strategic planning.
4. Interactive reports
To transform data into knowledge, Interactive reports prove beneficial. They help the users in
obtaining an improved understanding of the evaluation within reports as well as the primary data
which is the base of those reports, to promote improved decision-making.
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5. Meta data layer
Removing the requirement of coding and SQL, a meta data later aids in making reporting simple.
This helps the users as well as report writers to observe and obtain info in a simplified language
of business. Without understanding the complications of the basic data/database, the users tend
to individually have interaction with the data at the level of meta data.
6. Ranking reports
With the help of this feature, you can make reports which order particular categories of info,
through numerous dimensions, by choosing a particular criterion. Also, with the aid of these
reports, you are enabled to observe the worst/best performing aspects in regards to your business.
For instance, you can make a report for ranking your ten top-selling sales persons, products or
regions.
7. Utilizing BI for undertaking Sales decisions
BI particular to industry aids the companies in identifying the in-depth sales trends which
are base on various aspects of their consumers like buying habits, choices and others. By
controlling the purchasing habits of their consumers, a company can choose the best COA for
keeping the precious consumers as well as taking benefits of the gone sales opportunities.
Gaining such detailed visions, a company can immediately choose which products best suit
cross-selling or which opportunities related to link-sell need to be increased. By finding out the
declining consumers, a company can establish the most effective plan for product re-positioning
before they finish purchasing entirely. Sales managers have expertise in finding out the best
consumers, where they can be located as well as establishing the best strategies of acquisition
and conversion. To make decisions related to top promotional strategies or whether to allow
certain customers to leave, the company needs to identify the bottom-buyers. For amalgamating
mgt. decision making and marketing, a plain image of sales trend is a must.
8. Undertaking improved financial decisions with BI
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An updated view of the company’s financial status can be gained via Data Analytics.
Features like Phocas' Financial Statements can aid a manager in observing the figures of general
ledger, P&L, balance sheet. With the aid of an Outstanding BI, businesses can obtain quick
solutions to cost issues and revenue opportunities by drilling down to separate transactions. To
undertake decisions related to future financial status of the company, a business needs to
evaluate the present/past incoming/outgoing finances. The revenue must be broken down by
location so as to examine the product lines’ strength as per branch.
9. Role of BI in target customer identification
In modern customer-focused, digital marketing, entrepreneurs are exposed to a lot of
information. Hence, they are seeking better ways to gather, understand, and control these data
and information relating to the organization. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a
solution or a tool that align your enterprise in towards achieving customer information
management. These may involve gathering information from different departments. CRM cut
across many departments within an organization such as Finance, marketing, sales, production,
operations, and customer relations with huge success (Glancy and Yadav, 2011). This solution
provides a single point of customer details or profile based on their history interacting with the
company (Trieu, 2017). This is regardless of any means the customer might have used in the past
to communicate with the company. It keeps a detailed profile of the behavior of the customer
over time hence serving as a single point of references with intelligence information relating to
the customer. This information is vital when it comes to predicting future customer behavior and
using it to maximize marketing and sales efforts for the success of the business.
Task 3: Business Intelligence Design
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Ford’s Financial Overview BI Dashboard
We can use the BI for making a different variety of Business decisions. Here the screenshots
of Ford’s financial overview BI dashboard is attached. It contains different features like top-
notch visualizations, graphs, interactive features etc. And then it has been developed using excel
it is one of the major advantages of this system.
The developed BI dashboard is attached here.
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With the help of BI, important facts can be fetched from a huge quantity of unorganized data
and then converted into actionable info which aids the companies in undertaking informed
strategic decisions which further aids in making the business productivity and operational
efficiency better. With the aid of this actionable info we get important understanding which
discloses the primary flow of customer behavior i.e. their digital shopping experience or their
likes/dislikes. Daily, 1000s of consumer interactions are managed by the contact centers. These
contain essentially untapped important visions which have the capability of offering great value
to the business houses. Apart from the case when this info is examined for the purpose of Quality
Assurance, it stays mostly under-used.
Main requirements of the Ford’s Customized BI Tool
 The platform functions in respect to the BI software helps in setting the system’s
baseline. The performance of other tools of the software gets impacted by the features of
personalization, interactivity and simplified use.
 Representation of the analyses in a visual form is a crucial pre-requisite of the BI
software. (Foley and Guillemette, 2010) Reports aid in managing the data insights in
such a format which is simple to interpret, configure as well as share.
 By analyzing productivity, location-metrics, profits and social-media, analytics feature
helps in getting understanding of the business processes.
 As per the online analytical processing, the online data cubes which contain huge
(layered) info sets undergo a multi-dimensional examination.
 The potential of exporting reports in multiple doc formats enables a smooth info
communication (Post and Kagan, 2012).
 In regards to software (particularly cloud-based), one of the crucial issues is Security.
Ford’s Financial Overview BI Dashboard
We can use the BI for making a different variety of Business decisions. Here the screenshots
of Ford’s financial overview BI dashboard is attached. It contains different features like top-
notch visualizations, graphs, interactive features etc. And then it has been developed using excel
it is one of the major advantages of this system.
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The developed BI dashboard is attached here.
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Custom BI dashboard developed for Ford
 Location Intelligence can be known as the ability of mapping as well as visualizing
data in certain geographical formats. In order to gain knowledge of their business
operations from latest perspectives (like sales per region), it is crucial to explore and
visualize the data sets on the basis of geographical elements.
 To transform data into knowledge, Interactive reports prove beneficial. They help
the users in obtaining an improved understanding of the evaluation within reports as
well as the primary data which is the base of those reports, to promote improved
decision-making.
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 With the help of the ranking feature, you can make reports which order particular
categories of info, through numerous dimensions, by choosing a particular criterion.
Also, with the aid of these reports, you are enabled to observe the worst/best
performing aspects in regards to your business. For instance, you can make a report
for ranking your ten top-selling sales persons, products or regions.
References
Post, G. and Kagan, A. (2012). Business Intelligence. International Journal of Business
Intelligence Research, 3(3), pp.16-28.
Trieu, V. (2017). Getting value from Business Intelligence systems: A review and research
agenda. Decision Support Systems, 93, pp.111-124.
Foley, É. and Guillemette, M. (2010). What is Business Intelligence?. International Journal of
Business Intelligence Research, 1(4), pp.1-28.
Glancy, F. and Yadav, S. (2011). Business Intelligence Conceptual Model. International Journal
of Business Intelligence Research, 2(2), pp.48-66.
Task-4
Task 4: Importance of BI to effective decision-making
With the help of BI, important facts can be fetched from a huge quantity of unorganized data
and then converted into actionable info which aids the companies in undertaking informed
strategic decisions which further aids in making the business productivity and operational
efficiency better. With the aid of this actionable info we get important understanding which
discloses the primary flow of customer behavior i.e. their digital shopping experience or their
likes/dislikes. (Ignat, Becker and Lorenz, 2014) Daily, 1000s of consumer interactions are
managed by the contact centers. These contain essentially untapped important visions which
have the capability of offering great value to the business houses. Apart from the case when this
info is examined for the purpose of Quality Assurance, it stays mostly under-used.
Task-5
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The Importance of Business Intelligence –Evaluation
Majority of Nonprofit organizations use Business Intelligence applications. Some of the
reasons why this application is popular with these kinds of organizations are that it provides the
following advantages:
 Seamless data integration
 If quite flexible to use
 Simplifies data distribution and visualization
Many businesses prefer storing their data in different compartments. (Wu and Zhao, 2014)
For instance, information on donors can be on one section, clients, and financial information in
the second and third database respectively. A business intelligence application will enable you to
link up all the three datasets such that you can access and manipulate data in any of the
databases.
This is possible regardless of which application was used to store the data. E.g. Access,
Excel or any other as long as that database application has an API.
BI tools transfer the data for virtual storage in a cache or a different data warehouse. From
here, any manipulation can be done without interfering with the original dataset. It is possible to
set automatic or manual data loading based on time or occurrences.
References
Wu, Q. and Zhao, H. (2014). Design and Implementation of Business Evaluation System in
Business Intelligence Network Management System. Applied Mechanics and Materials, 687-
691, pp.2047-2050.
Ignat, V., Becker, L. and Lorenz, P. (2014). Patent Analysis by Business Intelligence Tools and
Strategic Growth Opportunities. Applied Mechanics and Materials, 657, pp.901-905.
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