Implementing a Business Intelligence Environment in Local Market of Pakistan

The BI (Business Intelligence) has gained great success during the last decade throughout the world to aid in decision support with the availability of necessary knowledge to reduce costs, increase revenues and minimize risks. The local market of Pakistan is still not very much aware of its benefits, except some multinationals which are using these tools since almost 7-8 years and earning more revenues and improved performances and a few others are under the process of implementation. The small and medium sized businesses of our local market are focused for the implementation of BI. The pros and cons are identified by analysing the BI tools being used by other large companies here in Pakistan and feasibility of these tools at small and medium enterprises is discussed so that they too may focus on their KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) to increase their performance level.


INTRODUCTION
to the operational data sores and knowledge management/content management in order to make better strategic decisions [2]. Sufficient amount of information has become a requirement and need of a human being in order to succeed in today's environment. The information needs to be integrated from multiple sources and adjusted to a certain level. The structure of sources and its amount may change with time and everything is needed to be available for decision making at each individual's dashboard in the up-to-date form. B usinesses have always been in a need of organizing their information/data to get the best benefit out of it [1]. The idea of BI came up as a solution to the businessmen. Especially with the fast growing world of business in the 21st century made the BI an unavoidable move. But the use of the BI tools gradually came up with a few areas to be explored more and to be worked upon in more detail [2]. The earlier decision support system had to be modified according to the modern needs. BI took many turns and it also incorporated the techniques of data warehousing, data mining and the latest issue identified has now moved on BI can be defined as the process of turning data into information and then into knowledge [3]. It was born in 1990's to support decision making and to better understand the key factors involved in the decision making.
During the last decade, the trends in BI have changed dramatically and companies started using BI to achieve their goals focusing on the strategies based on metricsdriven data warehousing [3]. Unfortunately, Data warehousing failed in top-down enforcement of company's strategies though supporting the bottom-up extraction of information from data. Hence, a new approach emerged which is called Business Performance Management. With the assistance of knowledge implementation and business process reuse, decision making efficiency of BI system can be improved when dealing with new tasks [4]. BI became a popular term in the business and IT (Information Technology) communities only in the 1990s [5]. In the late 2000s, business analytics was introduced to represent the key analytical component in BI according to Davenport in

2006.
In order to improve the efficiency of a business using a BI system, data is transformed into useful information and knowledge management techniques are applied to manage information and support decision making. An 'intelligent enterprise' is the one that uses BI to advance its business by predicting how future economic and market changes will affect its business [4]. The information collected and integrated from multiple sources is required to support the process of decision making. Amount and structure of sources can change with time and the level of detail can also be varied as well [6]. Application of BI tools was connected with data warehouse as a necessary prerequisite for the data mining as a further extension.
In this study, our local market has been focussed for BI implementation and the factors involved in the selection of tools have been analysed. The implementation strategies are then mentioned at general and specific levels and need of local market is identified for implementing a BI environment.

BACKGROUND/OVERVIEW
The quality of a company's information system has become recognized as a strategic corporate advantage.

Informed Decisions
As the companies became more dependent on the information-processing capability, the same growth of dependence put stress on that capability itself. With the expansion in business processes and the ultimate junk of information, now the companies need to filter out the information for making better decisions [4]. An 'intelligent' business is the one who can use BI tools to better predict how future economic and market changes will affect its business [4]. In BI, data is organized in such a way that report formation becomes very simple.

Issues with BI Implementation
BI works in conjunction with a proper OLAP engine. The OLAP engine must be supported by a DW which is a restructured way of data. In order to have an overview of basic information related to customer, product and performance, the simplest solution is to place information in one location and use it from this location for further analysis and reporting. Such solutions are known as DW [6]. If DW is not required in the business, at least a data mart must be in place.
Data storage is another issue. Data are stored in different formats at different places and in different type of databases. All the data must be consolidated to form a consistent business views that support the approach used for delivery [4].

Uses of BI in Local Market
The decade of the 2010s promises to be an exciting one for high-impact BI&A (Business Intelligence & Analytics) research and development for both industry and academia throughout the world [5]. BI may be useful in large or medium sized businesses where there is a huge amount of data to be handled at the backend. It helps in decision making by combining itself to the DW and providing every kind of report at just a click of a mouse [7].
It may be used in Trend analysis and for cross-selling of any two products, for making comparisons, e.g. Suppose Lever Brothers want to compare the trend of Lipton and Supreme to make future promotion policy. BI is the best tool for such a situation [8]. Previously businesses used ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) and have moved on to SAP now [9]. The BI may be helpful in fetching any of the two parts of a DW, i.e. transaction data which is collected on daily, fortnightly or monthly basis, and the reference data for linking customers, suppliers, vendors or even products [10].
It also tells the users whether a particular promotion It is defined as getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
Presentation is significant in BI [8]. Dashboards are created, relevant panels are created. Different users may want different combination of panels and BI provides easy to make creation of their own dashboards. Pivot reports and Score boards can be created within no time.
The only thing required is the right combination of OLAP tool and a BI tool. Businesses can pick any customer and see if he or she is making payments or not and in this way, you may know your customer better [10]. Sales people can analyse why there is an increase or decrease in Sales.
Shell Oils also makes comparative analysis using BI tool to see if any particular marketing campaign was successful or not. They also compare their performances before and after any particular strategy to focus if that particular strategy was successful or not [10].

Comparison between BI and MIS-for Local Market Users
Business have to bear upfront cost to implement BI in order to architect DW or Data Mart, create ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process, transfer data from Data Mart and create cycle/batch for smooth data processing.
Once it is implemented, it delivers every report very quickly making decision making process efficient and reliable [8].
MIS may be cost effective but it works in slow fashion.
Suppose the time limit to finish a report is 2 months, then by the end of two-month time, some reports may become obsolete or outdated as per the requirement of the report.
This is called data latency, which is the interval or gap between the time an event occurs and the time it is perceived by the user [3].

Why Need BI in Pakistan
BI is needed to make the decision making process more

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOLS IMPLEMENTED IN LOCAL MARKET
After conducting interviews with the BI experts and the users in their mentioned organizations, the list of BI tools was organised which are being used at particular organizations in Pakistan.

Cognos
It is a BI solution by IBM (Institute of Business

Business Objects
It is implemented at Unilever and they are taking full advantage of it by getting analytical reports in any required format and in a much reduced time as compared to the previous system according to a worker at Unilever.
Different departments get the customized benefit out of Business Objects, e.g. the sales people use it in their own way, the finance department has its own requirements of data analysis.

Mondrian
Mondrian is an open source OLAP server written in Java.

Server Analysis Services
It also offers excellent financial reporting, web analysis, and interactive reporting tools embedded into it. the whole information regarding their business using its end-user delivery mechanism [13]. It even has KPI dashboards which may be useful for BI implementation.

MS Share Point
The BI strategy of Microsoft comprises a suite of server and client-side data integration tools. As shown in Fig. 1

General Strategies
For implementation, data mart must be in place, OLAP must be in place and proper integration of both is utmost important [8].
Reporting front-end must be at its place for all executive users. The roles of all the users must be defined so that proper users may see proper reports needed for their managerial level. BI technicians are needed who can create BI reports on the fly and a Business analyst is also needed for implementing BI so as to identify what sort of reports are to be generated [8].
Further extension of BI goes to data mining. It gives the data density. Suppose sales are increased but the user doesn't know the reason why. Different factors are introduced and data mining helps to identify the data density in that particular business using all the factors using visualization. [8] Usually, the disparate data don't speak to each other, and each might be managed by different groups that report to different organizational entities [4]. Data quality has to be considered after the data has been identified and collected correctly. It would be a big mistake if this point is ignored.

Specific Strategies for Local Markets
Focusing on our local markets, the data must be cleansed and organized into a data warehouse or at least a data mart. Then it must be linked to a query language such as SQL since it is used as the backend tool in most of the different BI tools. All the steps discussed above are very essential for them to take the benefits of using BI and improve their analytical skills, planning and decision making.
Local vendors like AbbuSys may be consulted for BI support but they too claim that BI is not suitable for small businesses because of its complex backend requirements which may increase the overall cost to take the best advantage out of it.
Open source BI tools like Mondrian are also available to be considered as a cost effective solution but they have not been proved to be very successful BI tools through any source [8].

NEED OF LOCAL MARKET (RESEARCH FINDINGS)
The local market of Pakistan majorly comprises of medium Even Microsoft itself does its BI management worth $60 billion using Excel and is successfully increasing its revenues and ROIs [13].
In future, they plan to develop BI solutions that are affordable and easily accessible with a view to furthering the vision of BI for the masses.