Short answer, yes. Business intelligence isn’t just for the big guys anymore. Organizations of any size—even small-to-medium business (SMBs)—will benefit from the insight provided by a business intelligence tool. Many are even able to achieve ROI quickly.
Long answer, yes but it all depends on finding the right business intelligence tool for your organization. What’s right for you might not be right for everyone else. This goes doubly so for smaller organizations with smaller budgets.
Finding the right-sized BI tool for your organization thus depends on achieving four key things.
The Bottom Line: Your ROI
Getting started quickly is the key to ROI with an IBM i data access tool. The faster you can find out what’s going on within your business, the sooner you can act on it. That’s how you achieve ROI. And fast ROI is crucial to affordable business intelligence.
With Sequel Data Access, for instance, you can install the software and be up and running before your second cup of coffee. It’s that fast.
BI—Without Missing a Beat
More often than not, IBM i users already have queries from IBM’s Query/400 tool. You might even have hundreds of queries saved in your system. You don’t want to lose those queries by incorporating a modern tool—and you shouldn’t have to.
An affordable business intelligence tool allows you to import existing queries. With Sequel, for instance, it’s quick and easy to import Query/400 queries and add modern touches. This is also a great way to get started with data access. You won’t lose existing work, and you’ll enhance the queries you’ve already created. Plus, you can work with the queries in any interface—green screen, graphical user interface (GUI), or a web browser. You can even run them in a scheduled job, and they’re ready to go.
Decisions Powered by Data
Business intelligence is not business intelligence if it doesn’t empower your company to make better business decisions. And the best business decisions are made based on data.
Data should be real-time and fuel timely decisions. Finding affordable BI thus requires finding a tool that makes it easy to translate live data into usable business information. With Sequel, there are several ways to translate data. You can power a dashboard with a query. Visual elements on a dashboard make it easy for anyone to look at the data and see the message behind it. Plus, with Sequel, you can drill into the details of the information and find out what’s really going on.
Productivity—BI Without Wasting Time
Business intelligence isn’t affordable if it takes you hours to get to the data you need. Inefficiency is the trademark of an overly complicated business intelligence tools. Finding affordable BI depends on finding an efficient tool.
Productivity increases when users can dive into the data, slice and dice it, and deliver it quickly. With Sequel, it’s quick and easy to delve into real-time data. Sequel’s run-time prompts help users become more efficient as well. IT only needs to deliver a query once. Users can then select regions, dates, or other items as needed—and do it again, and again.
Your Answer: Right-Sized BI
Finding the right-sized business intelligence for your organization is the key to making it affordable. Here’s what you need to keep in mind. It needs to be fast and easy to get to your data. The data should be real-time and power your organization to new heights. BI should give you the capability to ask the questions yourself and get the answers. And above all else, BI should come at the right cost for your business.
For a relatively small investment, we gave a refresh to our capabilities to view our data—to the point where people now use these tools to make better decisions.
Eric Bushman, VP Information Technology, Mayline
Discover Affordable Business Intelligence
Discover the markings of an affordable business intelligence tool. Watch our recent webinar, Business Intelligence for the SMB’s Budget. You’ll learn how to make BI affordable, plus you’ll see a demo of Sequel Data Access.
