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BI Takes Over Where Canned Reports Leave Off

By Jim Hammond
November 14, 2005

So why don't more firms use Business Intelligence (BI)? Most of them just don't understand what BI is all about. Many firms have a pretty good report writer built into their time-and-billing system and their vendor provides many pre-designed reports, each with selection options. Moreover, many firms have someone on-staff who knows Crystal Report Writer. Isn't this all they need? No, it's not. Today's managers need more powerful and flexible access to financial information than canned or even custom-programmed report writers can deliver in a timely, economical fashion.

Todd Summerfelt, chief operating officer at the 60-timekeeper firm of Carney Badley Spellman in Seattle gets financial performance analysis requests from his partners all the time. He has, at his disposal, a slew of canned reports from his time and billing system as well as custom reports written in Microsoft ACCESS. These days, he finds it much faster and easier to simply use his Business Intelligence program to build an ad-hoc analysis of almost anything the partners request. “It is just so much easier to click on data elements from my data warehouse and choose an Excel Pivot Table as my output option. Canned reports, as good as they are, just can't handle all the special requirements,” says Summerfelt. Business Intelligence handles all the hard work. Excel Pivot Tables are challenging to build even for an experienced user; my BI program builds them automatically.”

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