Maintaining a competitive edge is not as easy as it used to be. In the past, companies simply had to offer superior products and services, and treat customers courteously in order to create sustained profitability and growth.

But today, organizations must be able to think on their feet, leveraging their most important asset – their enterprise data – to understand the status of their mission-critical activities, detect vital operational patterns, anticipate industry trends, and achieve the agility that will enable them to conduct business more dynamically. However, as companies deploy more and more business applications, and information architectures become increasingly complex, obtaining that type of actionable insight can become a tremendous challenge.

What is Enterprise Analytics Software?
Enterprise analytics software enables companies to perform reporting and in-depth analysis of detailed information from across their entire organization. Data from various systems, applications, and databases is accessed, gathered, compiled, formatted, and presented to end users, facilitating faster, more effective decision support by providing them with timely and vital insight about key operations and activities.

Key Benefits for Your Company
Dramatic benefits can be achieved through the purchase and implementation of an enterprise analytics software package. The primary advantages include:

• Improved access to and integration of business data from disparate sources.
• Complete, 360 degree visibility into corporate activities.
• More rapid information sharing across the enterprise.
• Faster and more accurate detection of the positive and negative trends that impact the business.
• Real-time tracking of key performance indicators and critical metrics.
• Improved collaboration and communication with customers, suppliers, vendors, and other business partners.
• Enhanced strategic planning.

Does My Company Need Enterprise Analytics Software?
The challenge of managing enterprise data is especially difficult in large organizations. Frequently critical business information is scattered across disparate systems and applications that exist among various departments and business units. Without an enterprise analytics solution in place, retrieving, consolidating, and formatting that data – then harnessing it to support planning and decision making at both the strategic and operational level – would require extensive time and effort from IT staff, and delay the delivery of vital intelligence needed to support mission-critical business activities.

Common Enterprise Analytics Software Features
The enterprise analytics software packages on the market today typically provide the following features to enable better, faster, more informed decision-making across the enterprise:

Ad hoc Reporting
To minimize burden on IT resources, and ensure that front line workers have immediate access to the insight they need to perform their jobs on a day-to-day basis, most business intelligence tools offer the ability for functional end users to easily build and run their own reports, while shielding them from the technical complexities of the underlying data. .

Flexible Output Formats.
Most of today’s popular business intelligence systems enable users to present report output in a variety of formats, including spreadsheets, word processing documents, HTML, and other mediums.

Dynamic Scheduling and Delivery
This capability allows users to schedule reports to run and/or refresh at pre-determined intervals, and to have completed reports automatically “pushed” to relevant users via email, mobile devices, and other communication vehicles.

Financial Reporting
As legislation becomes increasingly stringent, and the penalties for non-compliance become greater, more and more business analytics solutions are incorporating financial reporting capabilities – such as templates for balance sheets and profit and loss statements, the ability to process and calculate financially-oriented data, dynamic conversion of foreign currencies, etc. – into their offerings.

What to Look for When Choosing a Business Analytics Solution
While most business intelligence solutions will provide a broad array of reporting and analysis capabilities, there are some more advanced features that will set some systems apart from the pack. These include:

Scalability
As the value of a business intelligence environment becomes clear, more and more users will want to leverage it. Additionally, as an organization thrives, the number of reports needed, and the number of data sources to be accessed, will grow. Not all business intelligence solutions are fully scalable, so be sure to choose one that can address expanding capacity needs and support broader access and reporting requirements as they emerge.

Unlimited Data Access
Finding a business analytics solution that accesses common or widely-used systems is easy. But, if your organization maintains data sources that are proprietary, antiquated, or obscure, you may be challenged to find a vendor that can easily access and report on the information contained within them. However, there are some vendors that have either developed a portfolio of data adapters – or partnered with an application integration company – to address this very requirement.

Visualization
Enterprise data can be highly complex, making it difficult for functional users to understand and interpret it. While most business analytics software packages offer some basic visualization capabilities – such as simple charts and graphs – more advanced visualization techniques such as matrixes, scatter plots, histograms, and maps may be needed if your information is scientific or mathematical in nature.

Predictive Analytics
Are forecasting and advance planning part of your business intelligence needs? Then you may want to look for a solution that offers predictive analytics – sophisticated algorithms and formulas that mine historical data for patterns and trends, and use it to make weighted anticipations regarding future events and activities.