Business intelligence applications and technologies can enable organizations to make more informed business decisions, and they may give a company a competitive advantage. For example, a company could use business intelligence applications or technologies to extrapolate information from indicators in the external environment and forecast the future trends in their sector. Business intelligence is used to improve the timeliness and quality of information and enable managers to better understand the position of their firm in comparison to its competitors.
Business intelligence applications and technologies can help companies analyze the following: changing trends in market share, changes in customer behavior and spending patterns, customers' preferences, company capabilities and market conditions. Business intelligence can be used to help analysts and managers determine which adjustments are most likely to affect trends.
BI systems can help companies develop consistent and "data-based" business decisions--producing better results than basing decisions on "guesswork." In addition, business intelligence applications can enhance communication among departments, coordinate activities, and enable companies to respond more quickly to changes (e.g., in financial conditions, customer preferences, supply chain operations, etc.). When a BI system is well-designed and properly integrated into a company's processes and decision-making process, it may be able to improve a company's performance. Having access to timely and accurate information is an important resource for a company, which can expedite decision-making and improve customers' experience.
In the competitive customer-service sector, companies need to have accurate, up-to-date information on customer preferences, so that the company can quickly adapt to their changing demands. Business Intelligence enables companies to gather information on the trends in the marketplace and come up with innovative products or services in anticipation of customer's changing demands. Business Intelligence applications can also help managers to be better informed about actions that a company's competitors are taking. As well, BI can help companies share selected strategic information with business partners. For example, some businesses use BI systems to share information with their suppliers (e.g., inventory levels, performance metrics, and other supply chain data).
BI systems can also be designed to provide managers with information on the state of economic trends or marketplace factors, or to provide managers with in depth knowledge about the internal operations of a business.
Comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure—Reduce cost and increase productivity with a common infrastructure for producing and delivering enterprise reports, scorecards, dashboards, ad hoc analysis, and OLAP analysis
Powerful user experience—Increase user adoption with a powerful, task-oriented navigation framework. Features such as rich visualization, interactive dashboards, a vast range of animated charting options, OLAP style interactions and innovative search and actionable collaboration capabilities deliver an unrivaled end-user experience
Unified business model—Ensure that all metrics, calculations and definitions are uniformly consistent to provide better alignment and visibility across the organization
Hot-Pluggable—Integrate with all popular extraction, transformation and load tools, databases, business applications, application servers, security tools, enterprise portals, and desktop tools
Best-in-class scalability, reliability and performance—Optimize performance while simplifying systems configuration and lifecycle management. An integrated systems management console provides superior scalability, high availability, and security benefits, while making upgrades and systems management effortless
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBIEE) is a comprehensive business intelligence platform that delivers a full range of analytic and reporting capabilities. Designed for scalability, reliability, and performance, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g delivers contextual, relevant and actionable insight to everyone in an organization, resulting in improved decision-making, better-informed actions, and more efficient business processes. Oracle also provides the industry’s only multi-sourced BI applications, as well as market-leading performance management applications that are powered by this BI platform.