Business Intelligence

What exactly are Application Services? Timely access to relevant information has always been critical to business success. The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of this timely business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to support better business decision making. Prequel Solutions is at the leading edge of developing BI and electronic dashboard solutions. A BI dashboard provides a high-level overview of the current state of an enterprise.

Developing an effective Business Intelligence strategy is predicated on three key drivers: perceived value, organizational acceptance, and a cost effective solution. The development of a BI strategy should be tied to specific organizational performance goals and operational objectives.

Business Intelligence Strategy

Prequel Solutions works with clients to carefully architect a plan the enables them to realize significant increases in productivity and insights into the marketplace or their business. Much of the benefit obtained from the development of this plan comes from the process of developing the plan, not just the resulting dashboard. The plan provides a common set of terminology and a conceptual framework that enables a much more efficient and effective discussion of an organization’s strategy. The critical thinking surrounding the strategy, objectives, measures, and initiatives force an organization to address difficult-but very important-issues such as who they are targeting as their customer and what unique value proposition they are offering.

A key component of this plan is to identify metrics or key performance indicators (KPI). Metrics and KPIs are the building blocks of dashboard visualizations; they are the most effective means of quickly alerting users as to where they are in relationship to their objectives. Examples of the metrics could include increasing customer retention and reducing turnover of key personnel.

Organizational Change

A key part of the Prequel Solutions Business Intelligence strategy is a Cultural Change management component that leads clients through the organizational, cultural, and infrastructure challenges that can inhibit success. Technology can only address how we do things; however, the root causes for the dysfunctions are often in what we do—or don’t do. The failure of technology solutions to meet expectations is rarely related to the technology itself, but rather, to the underlying organizational barriers. Identifying the necessary changes to correct these barriers is not much of a challenge, but implementing the changes is. Changes usually involve something unfamiliar or unknown. It is human nature to fear the unknown. Although clearly defined changes can hardly be viewed as "unknown", the effects of these changes certainly can be. Prequel Solutions can assist you in plotting the course of successful change.

Technology

The final component of the successful Business Intelligence strategy is the technology. The technology must provide key decision makers - executives, managers, and analysts - a unified view of key performance metrics, graphical analysis, and reports in a truly interactive environment.

Prequel Solutions professionals can extract, transform, and load the necessary transactional data into a data warehouse that will provide a window into key strategic information, facilitating drill-down capabilities. Utilizing the various Business Information technologies, we construct solutions that provide a wide range of visualization tools such charts, dials, and grids.

Our "Dashboard" type user interface designs allow for presentation of complex relationships and performance metrics in a format that is easily understandable and digestible by time pressured executives and managers. More specifically, our interface designs significantly shorten the learning curve and thus increase the likelihood of effective utilization. Additionally, the proposed solution will be adaptable, scalable, and maintainable.

Prequel Solutions has participated in the Microsoft Certified Partner program since 1994 and has been a GOLD CERTIFIED Partner for the past ten years. In order to maintain our GOLD certification, we must meet conditions of technical skill and levels of client satisfaction that Microsoft measures annually. Prequel’s strengths include Business Intelligence system development utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework, Visual Studio, VB.NET, C#, ASP.NET, XML, Office and the following database products: SQL Server 2000/2005 and Oracle.

In addition to a Microsoft focus, Prequel Solutions is also experienced in developing Business Intelligence solutions within the SAP BI NetWeaver environment. Prequel Solutions has built complex interactive executive dashboards delivered to the user on the SAP Portal technology. Prequel Solutions has gathered requirements, designed, and developed SAP-based dashboards using the SAP Web Application Developer toolset extracting data from a SAP Data Warehouse.

Call Us

If Business Intelligence and Dashboards of Information may be on your horizon, Prequel Solutions would be pleased to outline the important benefits that a Business Intelligence Dashboard can provide to you and your organization. Prequel Solutions 724-820-1575