Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) 

If you find it challenging to quickly, effectively, analyse, report on, and share the information you need to manage your area of responsibility, we suggest you consider business intelligence (BI).  The information is in your system, you just need to access it easily!!!  Microsoft has a number of tools to help you reduce the complexity of organising and distributing information.

Gain insights from your data with proven and familiar Microsoft products that make it easier to work smarter and faster.

BI delivers on a simple promise: improved business performance by delivering better decision-making throughout your entire organization.

When you know that your insight into corporate data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust every decision you make. With that level of confidence securely in hand, you can improve business performance, create competitive advantage, and achieve corporate objectives. 

Microsoft BI is delivered through two layers: data warehousing and reporting and analysis. These are designed to provide a consolidated, comprehensive data source with tools to help improve decision-making.

Data Warehousing

Using the information that you already have, but do not utilise effectively, data warehousing can provide insight into your corporate data through an integrated, centrally managed, and trusted data source.

Microsoft BI provides the proven capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server Integration Services that can help you easily build and manage data warehouses that scale to meet the needs of even the largest and most complex organisations, but still be simple enough to be available for much smaller businesses.

Reporting and Analysis

Microsoft BI provides you with tools for reporting and analysis, and technologies that can map to your specific needs. You can work with the widely used Microsoft Office Excel as well as specific BI tools such as SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services and Microsoft Report Builder.

What’s more, to help you share insights with others, Microsoft BI uses both the BI capabilities built into Microsoft SharePoint and its core collaboration, search, and document management capabilities. With Microsoft BI, you have easy-to-use, economical tools that can help you access, report, analyse, and share information across your organisation.

BI in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

In addition to "generic" BI solutions, Microsoft also offers specific BI functionality within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. These include full drill-down and high quality data visualisation with the new real-time dashboards.

Or you can take advantage of the intuitive Report Wizard to instantly create ad-hoc reports.

A further BI capability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is flexible goal management. It allows you to define key performance indicators and then accurately track and measure progress against these.