In every industry, there is more than one software platform that empowers most business processes. As an example, your organisation may have HR software, Inventory control, Production and Order management systems etc. However, it is sometimes very difficult to create a relationship between the data produced by these system as they may have been developed by different software developers. Even it was developed by the same software developer, it may be running on different platforms I.e. desktop, web or mobile. Therefore, it is very difficult to bring in all this data into one centralised platform. However, today there is software which has been built to bridge the gap between your co-existing systems.
Most of this software require continuous development and maintenance. Some of these systems require exclusive hardware and extremely high processing power which is quite expensive. Following are the main considerations for an ideal centralised reporting system[
As most companies depends on more than one software solution, the ideal centralised reporting system should be able to communicate with all these different systems. Almost all the popular software systems provide means for external parties to communicate with their system such as Drivers, APIs or Software Interfaces. If your reporting system can communicate with these other software systems with or without using the above means, then more than 75% of your problem is resolved and you are on the highway to improved productivity.
Whenever you introduce a change/ new feature to your existing system or if you introduce an entirely a new software system to help with your everyday operations, your reporting system should be able to deal with this change without going through any modification. Existing reporting systems may need to be told how to communicate with newly introduced system/ change. This can be achieved by installing a platform specific driver which comes from external software vendors or updating existing drivers to their latest versions. The changes you make to your reporting system should be minimal in order to work towards the original goal of the reporting system. Every report your system produces should be real time unless you intentionally want to pull up old records. If not the reports produced by the system can be misleading which can result in dangerous consequences. Your data is always being utilised by decision makers with different perspectives and different goals such Top Management, Accountants, Store keepers, Inventory control departments, Production and Marketing teams etc. Therefore, a centralised reporting system should be able to serve the same set of data according to user requirements or perspectives. It’s always helpful if system can produce drill down scenarios so that the Users will be able to navigate from a Summary level, to all the way down to every last detail of each transaction.
It is very important the Reporting System should be able to represent your data in a meaningful way. It could be a chart, or a tabular report or maybe it even a pivot report that hierarchically organises your data. The dashboard concept enables users to get a high-level view of what is the current position.
It is very important that the Reporting system should be able to deploy in your environment without requiring any additional software or hardware. The goal here is to make most out of your existing data. We also believe that the Reporting system should use your existing hardware and software platforms without going through serious changes, which cost you money and time
iOM BI is used to improve an enterprise’s decision making by combining tools for gathering, storing, accessing, and analysing data. iOM Bl has evolved in to becoming a Comprehensive, Enterprise-wide Platform, that allow iOM self-servicing tools such as iOM EZ Reports.