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Business Intelligence Applications |
 | Business Intelligence (BI) is defined as methods and processes for the systematic analysis of business and corporate data in order to help provide a better basis for corporate decisions. BI has essentially replaced the earlier term „business analytics“, which was used to describe the systematic and periodic collecting, condensing and analysing of corporate, business and market data. Today, specialised modules within corporate software or autonomous software packages with associated databases for most or all business information have taken over the task of creating continuous Business Intelligence. As a part of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), in smaller companies, or Corporate Performance Monitoring (CPM) in larger companies. | To feed data into these systems, the ETL-process (Extraction, Transaction, Loading) is applied. It relies on automated analysis (Data Mining), automated recovery of structures and patterns in data pools (Knowledge Discovery), and conventional retrieval. Autonomous databases working separately from the productive systems are recommended to store the information (Data Warehousing). Apart from classical methods, the reporting requires special Data Mining techniques such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP).
BI applications are to be judged by their results, the quality and fitting accuracy of their scheduled or unscheduled reports, for which special software packages are offered. | | All database providers have specialised Business Intelligence tools available by now. Some of these have been bought instead of developed. IBM applies BI tools by Cognos, Oracle offers solutions by Siebel and Hyperion, and SAP provides instruments by Business Objects. The Microsoft in-house SQL-Servers are working with home made analysis and report tools: For example those offered under the brand names Share-Point Office, Excel, PowerPoint and Polyglott Biztalk. Likewise Sybase, specialised in analysis friendly databases, offers custom tools for reporting experts. SAS and SPSS for instance are independent BI specialists who co-operate with all other databases. They have specialised in the maintenance of DataWarehouse applications and the analysis and presentation of the information processed therein. | | Most of the time, the BI applications offered by the large manufacturers are unsuitable for strategic data management in the pharmaceutical industry because they are not designed to the special requirements of this data and their integration in data warehouses. For example, data providers delivering market data without key information so that incremental updates with new weekly, monthly or quarterly data are impossible. | However, there are software tools that both meet these specific conditions and are able to integrate third party as well as internal data (Bridging).
This Know-How is part of the core competencies of PharmaWare. |
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