Businesses who was declared the winner is able to provide products or services that fit customers' needs are often changing. For that way of doing business, companies are required to determine smart business strategy. In terms of determining business strategy requires a support for the availability of accurate and fast.
That is the right business decisions depends on the knowledge gained from data analysis activities of a company. Historical data collection and analysis is done manually it will take a long time. Now by utilizing the advancement of Information Technology (IT), the decision can be performed quickly, precisely targeted, efficient and able to encourage companies to be better. What system is able to overcome this? The answer is a Business Intelligence or BI is abbreviated as IT solutions in order to present the data in business activities making it easier to analyze and make wise decisions based on accurate information. Business Intelligence first appeared in 1989 and introduced by Howard Dresner of Gartner Group research institute. He said that Business Intelligence is a series of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and presenting data access to help corporate executives (executive management) in making decisions. BI can provide competitive advantage (competitive advantage) for the company through the use of data, information, and knowledge (knowledge) owned by such companies as raw material in the decision making process. BI also promises the ability to determine what is desired by the customer, product and market. Judging from his ability, BI will help once in business with an intelligent decision.
So BI is indirectly helping the company to stay afloat in the face of challenging situations such as falling revenues, reduced the number of visitors, the decline of sales transactions, and so forth. In principle, the the manager who took the best decision based on information obtained from BI. BI advantages compared to other computer systems is the ability to identify solutions by providing relevant information and easily combined with decision-making and be able to adapt to change. In my opinion, supported by good BI implementation structure, companies can adapt intelligently to give offerings to suit customer needs.
Although complicated because the data is used so much, but the result is an in-depth analysis and from a wider perspective. This is much needed both by companies of any level and any industry to stay ahead in an increasingly tight competition. The source data then undergo a process called ETL (extract, transform, load) that is selected from the data source data mature, uniform (distandartkan), merged into one single database and then loaded in the data warehouse. Furthermore, in the form of data warehouse fact tables and dimension. Which contains the fact table is the value which will be reported, while dimension tables will be the parameters of that size. Blend of fact and dimension tables will form a cube. Cube will define the size (measure) and the cube will be analyzed from various perspectives who then called OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) and results in the form of reports and analytic queries. Furthermore, these results can be visualized in various media is required. We have had a lot of IT companies that issued the Business Intelligence applications to corporate circles as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, SAS and others.
In my opinion, using the dashboard is more profitable because more dashboards quickly communicate important information through the presentation of data in the form of visualization and easy to use. But did not rule out another BI application forms are also able to help improve business performance such as portals, alerts, user application data mining, and others. Until now, BI is widely adopted by business people both outside and in Indonesia. Although the investment to implement BI in the enterprise is not a little but see the results and the gains will greatly help businesses to stay afloat in the future. But the company still must be vigilant with the use of BI applications in accordance with its capacity. If not, the investment will be wasted. So the main thing before implementing BI in the enterprise is the company's business strategy should have well-defined.