Top 4 Factors to consider during the evaluation process for choosing the right BI solution

Recently, Forrester published a report titled ‘Augmented BI Holds New Promises, But It’s Still Early Days’. The report highlighted the following key aspects:

• While several BI vendors are marketing their AI features and are pushing the need for augmented analytics, the critical need today revolves around Core BI capabilities.
• Core BI revolves around the ability to include operational reporting and derive insights from transactional data. Decision-makers are looking to ease the pain of their business users and reduce reliance on IT or software vendors to garner insights.
• Last but not least, the Forrester report recommends that the evaluation process for choosing the BI solution must revolve around the following four factors:

• Credibility and proven capabilities like specialties/focus areas of the BI vendor
• Data gravity (the platform where most of the data is going to reside) will play a key role in which operational reporting and analytics platform you choose. For instance, if your operational data is predominantly on Oracle EBS or Oracle Fusion, Orbit will be the ideal BI tool for your context
• Skills and technology prowess of the BI tool provider, including the availability of support resources
• The total cost of ownership, including data warehousing costs, maintenance, etc.

In the report, Forrester recommends Orbit Analytics as one of the best tools for instant, plug-and-play operational reporting.

Why a plug-and-play operational reporting solution is critical?

Let’s look at this from the perspective of a global manufacturing company with factories and offices around the world. The company also deals with a supply chain network of several thousand vendors and partners. It was using Oracle Fusion as the ERP to streamline end-to-end operations across SCM, manufacturing and production, distribution and logistics, inventory planning, etc. The finance team was using Oracle Financials for reporting and analytics.

Plug and play operational reporting plays a key role in increasing user adoption and democratizing access to data across the organization. It also plays a direct role in reducing costs – minimizing the need for expensive IT resources, maintenance of infrastructure, etc.

Generate Adhoc Reports and Operational Insights with Ease

Business leaders at the company were looking for a real-time, ad hoc reporting solution to improve the overall efficiency of operations. In short, they wanted their users to be able to run any report, at any time, and from any device.

Orbit’s SQL DirectQuery feature supports organizations to be agile and data-driven. SQL is the most familiar and widely adopted data language by developers and savvy power users. With Orbit SQL DirectQuery, there are no more saving scripts on the desktop; users can centrally maintain, share and reuse scripts as SQL Models to create reports that cannot be produced by semantic data models and create data extracts, and much more.

Blend Data Without Any Hassle

Also, there was a dire need to quickly bring in customer data from Salesforce, legacy operational data from Oracle EBS, in addition to data from a wide variety of purpose-built business applications.

With Orbit’s DataJump capabilities, this became really simple. Before implementing Orbit, the company had to rely on a software vendor to manage the process of data replication.

For more information on Orbit’s Data Jump capabilities, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/data-management/

As mentioned in another Forrester report titled “Now Tech: Augmented BI Platforms”, the overall BI segment can be divided into two categories:

• Reporting and Analytics Platforms
• Full-stack BI

In the first segment of Reporting and Analytics Platforms, Forrester highlighted the role of Orbit Analytics. Within this segment, it specifically focused on Orbit’s focus on serving the market for operational reporting for data in Oracle EBS, Oracle Cloud ERP, Netsuite, etc. Orbit’s customers in the enterprise segment include one of the world’s largest airlines, a leading financial services company, a large real estate corporation, including a few Fortune 500 companies.

Other key features of Orbit’s operational reporting platform include:

• Adhoc data reporting
• Operational insights
• SQL DirectQuery to generate reports from within the ERP
• Scheduled reports for operational decision-making
• Financial reporting
• Excel reporting

To know more about Orbit’s Operational Reporting and Analytics platform, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/why-orbit/