When Customer Relationships Meets Business Intelligence Marketing Analysis and User Recommendations
P.J. Jakovljevic - August 12, 2005

Marketing Analysis

Strategic moves by SAS Institute (see Part Two of this note) are a response to the requirement that modern business intelligence (BI) suites be able to access and present key business measures for sales, customer service, the supply chain, financials, purchasing, inventory, and many other areas. In addition to these functions, BI suites must also provide the ability to use information building blocks as the basis for comparisons, calculations, ratios, and metrics. Users should be able to dynamically combine business measures to derive key performance indicators (KPI), such as product profitability, margin analysis, book-to-bill ratios, return on investment (ROI), and other vital metrics. Typical data that manufacturing enterprises should know about, on a daily basis, include inventory situation, rejected items, throughput, booked sales, order status, on-time shipments, and warranty levels. In each of these categories, users may want to get behind the numbers and trends to discern the root causes or find out what items, regions, channel partners, or customers are involved...