Business Intelligence (BI) has become a very important tool for most businesses in today’s challenging economic environment. Companies are looking for the best way to cut costs, save money and utilize capital more effectively. Many BI tools do a good job of presenting information to executives in the form of company level dashboards, key metrics and financial reports, but for a BI tool to truly have an impact on organizational behavior it must go beyond that. BI tools should provide information to users in a simple, timely manner at any level within the organization. However, for most BI products on the market it would be far too costly to purchase a license and train everyone that requires access to the information. Distribution of information is often an afterthought and not easily accomplished. This is where BI tools that leverage a company’s existing email system can provide a much easier and cheaper method of ensuring that everyone within the organization has access to the information they need, when they need it and in the required format. It can also help users to manage by exception at their level within the company.
Infomanager WebAdviser™ provides BI over the Internet and via e-mail
Email is used throughout most organizations today and provides a simple and convenient way to get reports and dashboards where they are needed. Many BI tools today will allow someone who can login to the system to manually send out a report where they have found something of interest, but that is no longer enough! For example, a sales manager may want to be able to schedule a weekly sales report to go out every Monday morning at 6:00am to each of his account managers. The ability to schedule reports and transactions to send out at certain times or on certain days of the week is an important tool. Many companies realize this may lead to an overload of repetitive information that users will begin to ignore. Thus, a critical tool is the ability to manage by exception – taking a report and adding business rules that are evaluated at run time to determine whether or not the report should be sent out.
For example, our sales manager from above also wants the system to monitor the outstanding A/R for each of his account manager’s customers. He could set up a report with A/R for each customer that is emailed out every Monday, but in today’s fast paced world that may not be soon enough. What’s really needed is the ability to monitor the report for each account manager and as soon as an A/R level breaches a certain threshold, an email of the report or dashboard will be sent to the account manager at that moment. Again, this avoids un-necessary emails and is a key part of being able to manage by exception and respond to issues more quickly. In addition, using email to distribute information may be more cost effective as most users will get the information directly in the email or as an attachment and will not need a license or training on how to use the BI tool.
InfoManager Messenger™ is an example of a tool that provides all of these capabilities (and more) as a part of the InfoManager WebAdviser™ product suite. WebAdviser™ is a complete BI tool that runs in a web browser and allows end-users to access their reporting environment anywhere they have access to the Internet. InfoManager Messenger™ is a powerful component of WebAdviser™ that offers the following capabilities:
1.) Send Immediately – Messenger allows users to send out a report as they are looking at it and request information they have questions about. This allows users to quickly communicate areas that need further investigation.
2.) Scheduled Reports – Users can set a subscription to a report to be sent out on a scheduled basis – for example every morning, once a month or on the first or last day of a month. This allows managers to put the information in the hands of those who need it on a regular basis.
InfoManager Messenger™ can schedule reports to go out on a regular basis.
