BI in SMEs suffers from "Excelitis"

Until recently, professional business intelligence was reserved for large companies. On the one hand, the projects were extremely complex and expensive; on the other hand, data-supported corporate management was still not the hot topic that it has become today. Things have changed. Due to increased efficiency and competitive pressure, reliable and secure corporate management has also become the order of the day for SMEs.

Expectations and benefits of BI for SMEs

If SMEs want to invest in their business intelligence, what they primarily hope for is to "cure their Excelitis". This phenomenon involves time-consuming, manual preparatory processes and is marred by inconsistent Excel tables, outdated data and faulty calculations. In addition, Excel reporting is often dependent on a single person.

As well as reporting, SMEs also expect their BI to increasingly support them in planning their business. Whether for the whole business or just parts of it. Our practical experience confirms this: Nowadays, around half the companies want to also be able to plan using their BI.

However, the use of BI to calculate forecasts and future predictions is not (yet) relevant for most SMEs. Large companies or those for which business is highly dependent on future trends are currently trying to do this.

Requirements for SME-compliant BI

SMEs are looking for lean BI solutions. As a rule, they want to start small and with a low investment in order to be able to grow along with increasing requirements. Ideally, they can introduce BI and try it out without having to build up additional IT resources. Cloud-based solutions are particularly suitable here. And – last but not least – they want a BI partner that always thinks and acts like an SME. The declared goal of business intelligence in SMEs is to regularly ensure the most automated and robust reporting possible, thus forming the basis for secure and reliable corporate management.

"Individual-standard" as the optimal solution

In many SMEs, ERP is at the heart of the IT landscape. Evidently, even during its development BI is directly scheduled in ERP. However, ERP producers still offer only rudimentary BI solutions. In many cases, these only work with ERP data and are therefore not suitable for company-wide reporting.

Even if the primary focus is on reporting ERP data, professional BI must not rule out other data sources. The following two recommendations remain true to this spirit of the "individual-standard".

As an initial recommendation, an SME interested in BI should start looking for a solution for its ERP that is already pre-produced "out-of-the-box". Such products are rather rare on the Swiss market. Examples include AXview and iVIEW for ABACUS or proALPHA Business Intelligence for the ERP of the same name.

More forward-looking solutions are often offered by frameworks that already have a large proportion of the necessary functionalities available as "semi-finished products". This makes it possible to build company-specific BI solutions quickly and comparatively inexpensively. In view of this realisation, many BI vendors now offer templates for their BI products such as Qlik, Jedox or Cubeware. Genuine BI frameworks go one step further: they can be used in both a technology-neutral and source-neutral manner and thus significantly reduce implementation costs, especially in more complex environments.