BI for Your System i
Legacy modernization involves using your existing investments and adding important business functions to improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and extract more value from your System i servers.
Too often, System i organizations find that their investment in first-in-class applications leads to silos of information that become difficult to integrate and analyze. To analyze these different systems, organizations have tried a number of approaches:
 | Swapping one reporting system for another |
| Extracting and transforming the data and building a data warehouse |
| Buying new enterprise systems because the new system promises improved reporting |
Unfortunately, each of these solutions has drawbacks.
For example, many companies buy software products such as SAP to run much of their business. Unfortunately, these products often have complex data structures that do not facilitate effective analysis. A company may have customer relationship management and supply chain management applications that are completely separate, yet both contain information critical to making strategic business decisions.
By addressing these concerns, Microsoft has become the number one provider of Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure across all platforms for the past four years. With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, Microsoft raises the bar. Organizations now have a single, consistent solution for reporting against either online transaction processing or online analytical processing data stores.
Some of the useful projects you can now easily accomplish include:
| Market Basket Analysis. Determine items sold together and allow analysis on the results. Use the results in an application to create an online recommendation system or to determine how combinations of products contribute to profits. |
| Churn Analysis. Create reports showing customers at risk of canceling their service. |
| Market Analysis. Define market segments by automatically grouping like customers together. Use these segments for trend analysis for designing marketing campaigns. |
| Forecasting. Forecast sales and inventory amounts and learn how they are interrelated. |
| Data Exploration. Understand your customers by viewing patterns discovered by the data mining algorithms. Compare the differences between high-profit and low-profit customers, or between customers that prefer different brands of the same product. |
| Web Site Analysis. Determine how people are using your Web site and group similar usage patterns. |
| Campaign Analysis. Spend marketing dollars more efficiently by targeting the people most likely to respond to a promotion. |
| Data Quality. Determine missing values and anomalies in your data as it is entered or loaded into your data warehouse. |
| Text Analysis. Analyze feedback to find common themes and trends that concern your customers or employees. |
Business Intelligence That Makes Sense for Your System i
Why should you use a Windows-based BI solution for your System i rather than a native System i application?
1. | Many System i shops have Windows skills and expertise, so you can make the best use of your investment in Microsoft technologies and experience. |
2. | Windows-based BI solutions cost less than System i or AIX-based software and have low total cost of ownership. |
3. | Microsoft is the number one provider of BI solutions, and many end-users are familiar with Microsoft products, such as Excel. |
4. | System i shops need to use existing ERP solutions better because they are often too expensive to replace. |
5. | BI is a great place to drive value and reduce the large application backlog. |
6. | You get choice in hardware, such as deploying on an IBM Blade Center or other compatible hardware, such as Fujitsu or Dell. |
BI in Action
A new Microsoft BI system designed by Advanced System Designs of Morton, Illinois, gave Grimco's managers back more than an hour every day plus the information they need to grow their business.
|
Using two developers part time, Alticor built their new data warehouse running on HP servers with EMC storage that will hold five years worth of critical information to better serve customers and grow business.
|
Using SQL Server 2005, Sandvik now generates reports daily that used to take three weeks, vastly improving their ability to make timely decisions.
|
Key Partners
ASD has decades of experience with System i environments and unite that with the power of SQL Server 2005 BI. The result is delivering a best of breed BI solution to the System i customer.
Q4bis combines powerful Microsoft tools with a long history of high-impact data warehouse design and award-winning tool set to create analytics that help business users make decisions.
Ready to take the next step? Need to ask a question?