ActiveIS is a Microsoft Gold Partner for Data Management Solutions.

What is Business Intelligence?

In a nutshell, Business Intelligence is providing information to decision makers in a timely fashion.

Decision makers can be:

• Board Directors who need to have an overview of sales by area for the last 12 months so that they can plan strategy for the next three years.
  
• Managers who need to know how many support issues were raised this month compared to last month so that they can spot trends before they turn into issues.
  
• Supervisors who need to know many calls yesterday’s team wasn’t able to deal with so that they can plan the day.
  
• Business analysts who need specialist tools to be able to dig into large volumes of data to find hidden nuggets of information.
  
• Every employee who needs to be able see how their organisation is measuring up to targets or key performance indicators (KPIs).
  

In short everyone in an organisation can benefit from having accurate information in a palatable format at their fingertips.

What can ActiveIS offer?

ActiveIS has a proven expertise in building bespoke solutions using best of breed technologies. In SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Microsoft have produced products which are powerful, robust and have a host of features usually only found in products commanding a far larger price tag.

Any project of this type needs careful planning. ActiveIS will work with you to determine your exact requirements, plan the hardware and software platform, define the dimensions and measures that make up your data cubes, implement an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) strategy, build your standard reports and train your staff to perform their own ad-hoc analysis.

Top 8 reasons for implementing a Business Intelligence solution

1. Build on your existing investment in data management – the chances are that you already have several databases and you know that there is data in there that would be very valuable if only you had easy access to it.
   
   
2. Provide high-level overviews for management and customers – very often computer systems are developed for day to day use with little thought to management or customer need for high level overviews (with drill-down to detail of course).
   
   
3. Produce fast reports from aggregated data – SQL Server Analysis Services is based on cubes of pre-calculated aggregates so that high level summaries are near-instantaneous.
   
   
4. Provide timely data just where and when it is needed through familiar tools – Microsoft’s vision of Business Intelligence is that every individual gains access to the particular business information that they need through tools such as a web browser or Excel.
   
   
5. Enable drill-down from high-level aggregates to detailed data – use SQL Server Reporting Services, Excel or Microsoft ProClarity.
   
   
6. Enable data mining to uncover hidden trends or anomalies – use SQL Server Analysis Services powerful data-mining algorithms to gain insight into your data.
   
   
7. Consolidate data from diverse data sources into dashboards – present a high level view of several aspects of your business in a consolidated form using a combination of SharePoint dashboards, KPIs, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services and Excel.
   
   
8. Ad-hoc queries – empower your users to create their own simple reports in a safe way using the SQL Server Report Builder.