To compete, managers at all levels are acutely aware that they must make smarter decisions and quickly take action.  However, many lack the insight they need to make key decisions and are depending on hope that they have made the right ones. But as we know, hope is not a strategy. The statistics below were taken from a recent survey conducted by Accenture:

• 42% of managers use wrong information at least once a week
• 59% of managers miss information they should have used
• 47% of users don’t have confidence in their information

It’s not that they lack the data, but rather they lack the means to derive meaningful information when it’s needed – the right information at the right time in the right place. All areas of business are affected. There is also a need to further analyze this information to uncover new opportunities to grow revenue and reduce costs.   Solutions are available to provide this information both for the business process itself and from business intelligence (BI) solutions with vast reporting capabilities, but implementing these solutions alone is only part of the answer.  To quickly take action on opportunities, these solutions must provide real-time information at-a-glance – easily and quickly.

Business Intelligence (BI) and other data-driven BI applications such as SAP NetWeaver BW help businesses improve transactions and manage massive data volumes.  But technology infrastructure limits how fast you can analyze and get the information you need to make well-informed business decisions.  The higher data volumes you manage and analyze, the longer it takes to get information — the performance/cost ratio becomes a factor that cannot be ignored.  How do you keep performance high while managing costs? Dolphin is seeing success applying innovative nearline storage for BW applications.  Download Dolphin’s whitepaper at  http://pages.dolphin-corp.com/BWArchivingWP.html to learn more.

What’s risk?   Wikipedia defines risk as ‘the expected value of one or more results of one or more future events’. Technically, the value of those results may be positive or negative; general usage tends to focus only on potential harm that may arise from a future event, which may accrue either from incurring a cost or by failing to attain some benefit.

One of the 5 Key risks identified in 2009 by the Institue of Internal auditors Research Foundation was cost/expense reduction and containment risks. Identified in this area are the presence of weaker controls, lack of control oversight and lack of segration of duty controls.  Specifics include not having real-time visibility to information upon which decisions are made.  This is especially true when it comes to financial process such as accounts payable and accounts receivable, order management, and the supply chain. ERP solutons such as SAP  help to mitigate this risk.  Add on solutions that enhance and provide visibility into processes go even farther in removing risk factors.