Fernando Labastida, communications specialist

As a business owner or operations person, you may be considering empowering your employees with information tools to enable everybody in your enterprise to make intelligent decisions while on the front-lines of your business. You’re convinced that micro-management is bad, and that a democratic workplace is good.

We agree. In our recent post Business Intelligence Software: Who Is It Really For?, David Abdo argued that business intelligence software should  not just be for executives, but for front-line managers and employees as well.  Read more... (436 words, 2 images, estimated 1:45 mins reading time)

Fernando Labastida, communications specialist

Continuing the series on fast growth companies or “gazelles,” in the previous post I discussed what a gazelle was and what three aspects of a company determined whether you are a gazelle or not.

In this post I continue to dissect Javier Murillo’s article to discuss the two axes of the gazelle “chart.”

How Does Your Company Compare to Others?

Technology companies have several resources to show them where they stand compared to others. For example, Gartner’s magic quadrant provides technology companies in dozens of industry sectors with a graphical display of where they are vis-a-vis their competitors.  Read more... (499 words, 2 images, estimated 1:60 mins reading time)

Fernando Labastida, communications specialist

As the owner or executive of a business, you have business goals. You have your 5-year goals or your long-term goals, and then there are steps along the way to reach those goals: medium-term goals and short-term goals.

If you were a retailer you might have the following goals:

Short term: sell a certain amount each sunny day, a certain amount each rainy day, a certain amount each holiday, weekend and weekday.

Medium term: Identify your best suppliers. Establish relationships with the most efficient, timely, reliable and innovative suppliers. Attract a higher number of baby boomers than your competition.  Read more... (471 words, 1 image, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)

Fernando Labastida, communications specialist

With the good news that retailers are increasing their IT spending, I thought I’d give a brief overview of how smaller and medium-sized retailers can improve their performance with business intelligence tools.

As a small or medium-sized retailer you face many challenges, not the least of which are increasing competitive pressure from superstores such as Wal-Mart, from smaller niche players, Internet-only Ecommerce sites, and many more.

You can start a social media marketing campaign, as that’s a good low-cost way to improve your marketing reach.  Read more... (450 words, 1 image, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)

By Tracy Fabian, Pre-sales engineer, and Fernando Labastida, communications specialist

What you don’t know will hurt you

Imagine you’re the owner of a successful wholesale company that’s been growing really fast. Large and small retailers are beating a path to your door to buy your product. Things are looking great. You’ve predicted sales are going to grow by 50%, so you plan purchases of your supplies accordingly.

All of a sudden, a year goes by, you don’t have any cash to pay next month’s payroll and your warehouse is full of unsold items.  Read more... (1803 words, 2 images, estimated 7:13 mins reading time)

Tracy Fabian, pre-sales engineer

Company Financial Health: Not Just Revenue And Expenses

In today’s economy, it is imperative that organizations track the financial status and health of their company.  It is not enough to only track cash or revenue coming into the company; you also need to track what is leaving the company.  Just as important, if you are an organization with inventory, you need to be able to tell quickly how much money you have tied up in inventory and what products are moving the quickest vs. what products are sitting on the shelves.  Read more... (448 words, 3 images, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)

By Tracy Fabian, pre-sales engineer

Business Intelligence for Small and Medium Enterprises

In today’s marketplace, small and medium organizations are looking to deploy Business Intelligence (BI) applications in the most cost effective manner.  Software as a Service (Saas) provides a more cost effective solution than most BI fully licensed applications.

But before you implement any old BI SaaS application, make sure it’s comprehensive. It should allow you to monitor, analyze and act on your data.

All of these attributes should be available in one application.  Read more... (447 words, 4 images, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

By Sergio Garza Govela, VP of Sales

Not to jump on the “let’s analyze why LucidEra went out of business” bandwagon again (well, yes actually). There have already been countless blog posts and articles by respected analysts and bloggers such as Trident Capital, their VC firm, David Raab, and Merv Adrian, to name a few, that have discussed the reasons.

Of course other Saas vendors, our competitors, have done the same.

But it brings up a question on the value that BI providers bring, and Saas BI providers in particular. Where’s the business value?  Read more... (792 words, 2 images, estimated 3:10 mins reading time)

BI coming to Main Street

By David Abdo, CEO

When Inc. Magazine starts talking about what Business Intelligence software is, you know BI is moving down from the ivory tower into main street.

I was very heartened to see the recent article, “A Business Intelligence Software Primer” by Michelle V. Rafter. An article after my own heart.

Rafter’s article gets to the main point behind what Business Intelligence software, and business applications in general, should be about: providing real business value to real businesses.

Here are my favorite parts of Rafter’s article:  Read more... (473 words, 2 images, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)

Cash flow is king

By David Abdo, CEO

In my last post, How Small Business Can Survive The Recession With Business Intelligence, I talked about how small companies, in general, can utilize business intelligence tools to help streamline their business and cut costs.

I know I was a little sparse on the details.

Fortunately we’re starting to see more bloggers, such as Ken Kaufman at the CFOWise blog, explaining the basic indicators that small businesses should measure in order to be successful.  Read more... (537 words, 2 images, estimated 2:09 mins reading time)