There’s a standing joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron — that countless battlefield disasters prove the words military and intelligence don’t belong in the same sentence.

Unfortunately, the same joke can be applied to many businesses. Not because businesses are stupid, but because of a common perception that implementing business intelligence (BI) software to manage reporting and analytics is expensive, lengthy and complicated.

That perception, which might be accurate for some BI solutions, isn’t universally true. But it’s a hard prejudice to shake as, for some organisations, it has been the experience.

When acquired as a standard feature of an expensive ERP system, business analysis tools can indeed be dauntingly difficult to use. It’s a truism of the packaged software world that only a fraction — perhaps 10 to 20 per cent — of the full functionality of most packages is used.

You’ve paid for the development of a complicated piece of software, 80 per cent or more of the features of which you are not even using – they are benefiting some other customer.

We believe there is a better way – and it lies in putting the proof first.

Apart from encouraging organisations to consult reference case studies of their peers’ results with reporting and analytics, we find the best way to open their eyes is to demonstrate — with their own data — the benefits they could be getting.

When we go through our proof of concept process with a prospective customer, we find roughly half commit there and then to buying the software — not a bad conversion rate in a recession.

The process we go through is simple. The first step is a non-disclosure agreement – true insight can be commercially sensitive. Next is to request all relevant data for sales, inventory, financials etc. Detailed data from multiple sources and formats can be accommodated – be it from your ERP system, CRM, Excel spreadsheet or that good old Access database.

Inside three days we will deliver your data in our solution, revealing hitherto hidden trends, such as showing how stock levels and sales track against each other, or highlighting which are your best suppliers and most valuable customers – among a wealth of other detail that, when used in business decision-making, will have an immediate bottom-line impact.

Because we do this all the time, we cut through to the important stuff quickly.

C-level managers are a necessary part of the hands-on demonstration. They can be shown immediately valuable new insights with which to run the organisation. They will also see that with virtually no traning they, and the organisation, can be up and running quickly.

The proof of concept process has often successfully changed a perception that BI is hard, both to implement and use, and costly.

The next phase, if required, is aligning the software with strategic goals and performance measures. Within a fortnight of demonstration, we can have pre-built Sales, Financials, Inventory and Supply Analytic insights at people’s fingertips.

The point is that it doesn’t have to be a scary, drawn-out process. And the payback is typically quick and dramatic – for one customer, $2 million was shaved off inventory costs without harming the business; for another, waste of $500,000 a year was eliminated.

Something to remember about ERP systems is that they are designed to capture information, but not necessarily in a way that’s easy to make sense of. Perhaps the better way of thinking about business systems is to start at the other end – what key things would you like to understand out of the myriad of data that is accumulating day after day?

We are so confident that our reporting and analytics solution will more than pay for itself, we have launched a campaign to give the licence away to any new customer who doesn’t get the promised payback.





Asj Smith            
General Manager- APAC
iQ4bis Management Software Limited
+64 9 366 2635
Visit our website www.iQ4bis.com







9/12/18_ex_m_h_nl