ICS recognises that the BI challenges facing Mid-market organisations vary enormously from those faced by large enterprises. Historically BI vendors have developed solutions which try to address enterprise scale issues with enterprise scale solutions and enterprise scale costs. ICS believes that the lack of Mid-market focused solutions has meant that these organisations have either been forced to invest in solutions with higher Total Cost of Ownership and Longer Return on Investment, or have continued to treat BI as a low priority.
ICS has addressed these issues by enabling organisations to benefit from data consolidation, analytics and reporting through their existing IT investment in Microsoft’s BI platform and in combination with RSinteract, the ad-hoc end-user tool for SQL Server Reporting Services.
Capitalising on Existing IT Investment
ICS BI solutions take advantage of the enterprise-grade reliability, high
performance, and scalability of the Microsoft® SQL ServerTM Business
Intelligence platform. SQL Server delivers comprehensive capabilities
for data integration and transformation (Integration Services); analytical
query, calculation, and data mining (Analysis Services); and reporting
(Reporting Services). These capabilities enable people at all levels of the
organisation to transform disparate data into shared information they can
use to make decisions and take actions that improve business outcomes.
Reducing Complexity for IT and the Business
RSinteract is the essential end-user tool for SQL Server Reporting Services. It allows business users to generate and interact with reports dynamically and intuitively via a standard web browser. Using RSinteract and Reporting Services business users at all levels can self-serve information for monitoring, analysis and reporting to provide decision support capability at the point of need, regardless of technical ability.
Data Consolidation
ICS aims to remove the costs and fear typically associated with the concept of data warehousing. Mid-market solutions from ICS focus on integrating data relevant to the business objectives. Our consultants and developers are expert in delivering solutions across the full breadth of business intelligence, encompassing database design, analysis, data warehousing, data distribution, reporting and OLAP. We help organisations to use a combination of tools available from Microsoft to deliver scalable, resilient business intelligence solutions.
Information Supply Chain
Mid-market business intelligence solutions from ICS help organisations join highly summarised strategic performance indicators to live, operational and tactical reporting allowing them to focus on supporting decisions at all levels of the organisation. Streamlining the information supply chain allows information and report consumers to define the information they require, the format it is presented in and in what timeframe.
Navigating through information from top level trend spotting to root cause
analysis is capability normally reserved for highly specialised analysts in
large enterprise organisations. Using familiar Office and browser based
applications in combination with Microsoft® SQL Server technology,
organisations already over-reliant on key individuals to produce periodic
reports with smaller budgets can benefit from intuitive scorecarding,
analytics and reporting. This can be delivered to executive, management
and operational personnel rapidly and securely whilst retaining the
channel from aggregated key performance indicators to operational and
transactional data.
Managed Return on Investment
In the Mid-market the need to quantify and realise return on investment
is more acute than in larger enterprises with longer term goals.
Understanding how organisations measure solution effectiveness and
helping to identify how return on investment can be calculated, forms the
foundations of any ICS BI solution. Whether it’s reducing turnaround time
for period end reports (and effort involved in creating them) or providing
visibility and correlation between previously disparate sets of data to
highlight potential efficiency gains or scope for competitive advantage, it
is essential that these benefits can be demonstrably realised in as short a
timeframe as possible.
Traditional ‘big-bang’ implementations, in addition to being highly
disruptive and usually delivered many months after initial requirements
gathering, often fail to address the issues of the day and fail to
provide quantifiable ROI in time. Using agile project management
and implementation best practices, ICS concentrates on prioritising
deliverables to add value as soon as possible. Iterative development and
roll-out allows end-users (and the organisation) to benefit very early in the
project lifecycle. Subsequent deliverables build on the existing solution to
ensure that the scope, budget and timescales are managed with constant
review of ROI.