Introduction
Business intelligence is an important process in any company. Business intelligence is a representation of tools and information systems that are useful in the planning processes of an organization. The role of these systems is that they enable users to get, keep, and assess company data that are useful in the process of making decisions. These systems give an illustration of the way customer profiling, profitability of services or products, analysis of statistics, and how inventory transactions are progressing (Rud, 2009). Many companies will collect this important information from the processes of their business procedures. They will use tools such as spreadsheets and database applications to ensure that they get the right information about the status of the business processes (Li, & Du, 2005). Business intelligence is an important process that should be handled with care. It should use strategic tools that will bring the best out of the company. Business intelligence is gaining popularity as competition between organizations is getting technology-oriented by the day. Getting important and useful information from business processes is an important aspect of any business (Weinzettl, 2010). There are many ways in which businesses are analyzing the business processes and getting the best strategies from analysis of the data. Data mining has been exploited to show the trends of business processes. This paper will focus on tools that are used to undertake business intelligence and make a recommendation of the best business intelligence tool (Jantsth, 2010).
Business intelligence tools
There are different business intelligence tools that are available in the market. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Business tools have been categorized according to how they have been developed (Weinzettl, 2010). The other business intelligence tools include InsightSquared, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, SAP Crystal reports, Microsoft SharePoint, and SAP Business Objects. The rest of the report will focus on SAP Business Objects (Li, & Du, 2005).
SAP Business Objects
This is a business intelligence tool that was developed by SAP America. It enables employees to share data faster and efficiently compared to the other business intelligence tools. The online support tools that are supported by this feature include online chats, tutorials, email and phone. In terms of compatibility, this tool is compatible with Mac and Windows platforms. In terms of reporting and analysis, it has better reporting and compares features. It also has automatic scheduled features. The dashboard is customized. There is also the capability of forecast in terms of the budget (Jantsth, 2010).
The SAP business objects have universal design principles. These design principles are used in various platforms. SAP business objects have a universe which is a file that contains connection parameters. The universe also contains the schema of the tables and how the joins have been undertaken. There are classes and objects which are also used in the SAP business objects. Classes and objects are the structures that are contained in a universe. The users of business intelligence will connect to a universe and will run queries against a database.
The universe is useful in that the users will get an easy way to use and understand the interface that is underlying. Nontechnical people can use universe to render queries to the database. There are universal connections that are contained in the database. The universal connections are done through the universe. It has a list of values that are used in the database. These values are useful when running queries (Scheps, 2011).
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