Team Computers: Solution Champ for Business Intelligence

'Intelligent' Business

The world is rapidly moving towards
convergence and new business and connection paradigms are fast
evolving, breaking the
traditional quantitative factors in corporate governance. With the
fast evolution of 'Collaborative Commerce' (c-comm) optimizing
the supply and pattern of distribution channels, a critical factor of
data
manageability has come into the forefront whereby effective data
administration has always given
companies a competitive edge over others. It is here that Business
Intelligence (BI) comes into play,
which provides the foundation of c-comm. BI can be defined as a broad
group of application and technology for gathering, storing,
analyzing, and providing access to data, to help enterprise users
make better business decisions. Data management is however, the
enhancing efficiency of the organization with the availability of
information and adequate resources at one's disposal. One often
tends to confuse between the variants in this sphere; namely
enterprise resource planning (ERP) and BI. An ERP system is an
integrated IT application used to manage internal and external
resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials,
and human resources. Its purpose is to ease the flow of information
between all business functions inside the boundaries of the
organization and
manage the connections to outside stakeholders. Both BI and ERP
solutions are important for an
organization to make effective business decisions. Hence for an
organization, gaining maximum benefit from an ERP solution requires a
robust BI platform. “The integration of business intelligence and
ERP solutions is essential for a business to make the most from their
information in the present
and foreseeable future. ERP allows companies to have a clear view of
the management infrastructure. When business intelligence and ERP
meet, they link managers, executives, and other employees in a
way that is productive and beneficial for the organization's
growth,” said Maneesh Sharma, Business Head-User and Platform,
SAP India, discussing about the polarity of ERP and BI. When an
organization goes in for an ERP solution, the challenge typically
lies in the availability of a stout tool, which the company can use
to automate business processes. Business intelligence comes in when
an organization has the IT maturity where it has generated data, but
is facing challenges in making sense out of the data and driving
business decisions. “To accomplish success, organizations should
identify their need and align the correct BI solutions to address
them. By matching the technical requirements to that of the business,
the overall BI environment is more likely to deliver the desired
results,”
he added.

Implementation of BI solutions across
verticals requires identification of key business functions and starts
from the bottom up, to determine
the reporting requirements of the various stakeholders in each of
these business
functions. Not only it is critical to thoroughly define architecture
for each function to bring
together in one platform, one should strive to develop a coherent
architecture with a consistent set of
tools and the right degree of integration. “Organizations need to
agree upon a collaborative process on
building and integrating BI and Performance Management (PM) strategy.
Enterprises need to build BI
and performance management architecture as a best practice. Working
with BI technology in silos or having
a tactical approach can potentially lead to inflexible applications,
inconsistency in delivery,” Sharma
concluded. In the current uncertain economic scenario, Indian
enterprises, like their global counterparts, are also identifying
opportunities to streamline operations in order to maintain the
bottomline, boost shareholder confidence and create competitive
differentiators. Indian enterprises are certainly seeking investment
in BI solutions, which enable instant access to the information
necessary to make better business decisions. In the Indian context,
sectors like IT, banking, telecom and manufacturing have been early
adopters of BI technology. It is important to note, that this
adoption is true not only for BI solutions, but applicable as a trend
for any new technology in general. While these verticals are expected
to continue to lead the implementation, there is an enormous line of
opportunity in other industries such as retail, financial services
and insurance, as they are expected to become
aggressive users of business intelligence. “The overall BI market
in India is at a nascent stage, with a huge up-tapped opportunity for
vendors to capture. BI can deliver on this promise if deployed
successfully, because it can improve decision making and operational
efficiency, which in turn drives the topline and the bottomline.
Also, information generated from enterprise applications is at an
alltime high and will continue to increase. BI platforms can turn
that information into an asset on which better business decisions can
be made,” said Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence. According to
SAP, the BI industry saw a significant increase of deployment across
sectors. The wave of growth opportunities came primarily from
infrastructure, telecom, utilities, manufacturing and closely
followed by the public sector. The market saw rapid growth as more
organizations are turning to cloud-based computing and alternative
deployment options.

THE SOLUTION PROVIDER VIEWPOINT

Organizations, whether big or small,
are facing lot of challenges in reporting and analysis of data. ERP is
capable enough for transactional
reporting, but they face challenge when it comes to complex analysis of
data available from
different sources. These challenges are creating a storm and a whole
new set of requirements is
emerging around MIS and BI. Organizations have already spent on ERP
and now it is time for them to invest in BI. Also, according to
Valuepoint, BI solutions in India is growing at a rate of 30 percent
in the range of $50 to 75 million. Right now the market is for those
organizations, who have had wide
experience in ERP implementation over several years and are trying to
find the niche tool, which can help them. Sharing his experience over
BI analytic, Chandan Joshi of Phoebus Solutions said, “We thought
of entering the BI market about a year back and ran a market survey;
however, it did not turn to be quite satisfactory and hence we
refrained from focusing majorly over it. However, now, I feel
that there is a lot of aggression in the market and the situation is
improving. We might consider entering
into this segment this year.” One of the most important steps in BI
implementation is to define the BI strategy and the road map. While
computer systems are able to show direct and visible benefit to the
organization, BI will not be able to do so in the similar manner, as
the results are dependent upon the quality and quantum of data, which
the organization has. As such, there is a need to educate the
customer about the need for BI, how advantageous it is to the
customer, what can be expected in terms of RoI, knowledge
independency, how it can provide the edge to the client when
addressing the competition and his customer, how it can improve the
productivity and other related factors. “Education is also needed
to show the difference between standard MIS reports, to what can be
generated in a BI, given the predictive algorithms and complex
patterns existing in ERP data. ERP can be a storehouse of
transactions, but cannot be a true management decision making tool,
as that can only be provided by a BI tool,” said Radha Krishna,
Senior VP-Technology and Services, Valuepoint. Although SPs across the
country unanimously agree to the fact of the growth of BI, yet the
trend is not quite visible compared
to mainstream solutions like cloud computing. With the sole purpose
of BI being data analytics and reporting, it is often coupled with
other solutions for deployment purpose. Even over the
business field, SPs are not in the mood to prefer BI as their primary
service offering. Reinstating the same,
Hemant Chabria of Chabria Infotech said, “Although there has been
about 20 percent YoY growth in BI, I am not keen to focus over it as
our primary focus area.” Explaining the same, he added, “Low
profitability in this field and a continuous process of technology
change are the primary deterring factors. Although BI solution is
there in our kitty, we do not have any plans to expand it further.”
Although BI has not forayed into the tier-2 solution provider
segment, owing primarily to its limitation of low margins and time
constraint, some of the tier-2 SPs have actually evolved their
business by either focusing over this solution or framing a
significant department dedicated to BI.

THE CHAMP

Although, there are complexities
involved in the BI structure and the time required for its deployment
is not feasible for most of the Sps, Team Computers is a company,
which has steadily built up its business with special focus over BI
with over 120 BI implementations in a three-years time line;
contributing to about 15 percent of the consolidated topline of the
company. The bottomline share is even higher. The key specialization,
for the company has been over large deployments catering primarily to
the enterprise segment across verticals. Key clients for Team Computers
have
been Birla SunLife, SBI Life, Reliance General Insurance, IFFCO
Tokio, Videocon Telecom, Crompton Greaves, L&T Finance and
several others. With special techniques developed like Four Stage
Data Management, Relationalization, Telescopic Summarization and
Q-Deployer Approaches, the company has surely evolved the best
practices with its patent Q-Deployer solution making headway into the
BI tier-2 SP space. “Our significant success in 2010 has been with
Videocon Telecom, doing a record delivery of phase I implementation
in less than four months, providing dashboards, analytics and reports
for all the business functions. 2010 also marks our concentrated
entry into the US market, with success in over 10 customers with key
wins like Bloomberg, Symantec and Cisco. We have successfully
implemented enterprise-wide reporting solution for a large 100 years
old insurance company,” said Avadaiappan Rajendran, CEO-Business
Solutions, Team Computers.