More Smes Likely To Adopt Business Intelligence

Juhi Shrivastava The Economic Times

SMEs do not have deep and endless pockets like the large corporations; they cannot afford even small mistakes. They need to keep innovating to remain competitive at all levels. To fuel innovation within the organisation, it’s necessary to have a sound enterprise intelligence strategy in place.

This makes Business Intelligence (BI) a very important tool in today’s continually changing market scenario. BI solutions help organisations to transform information into intelligence, which in turn can fuel innovation and help organisations to leap frog their competitors.

BI is increasingly viewed as strategic initiatives for businesses to step change their performance. As SMEs have to continuously maximise productive efficiencies for survival and growth or to face acquisition/consolidation by conglomerates especially in the background of increasing cost of inputs (manpower, commodity, etc), these challenges make BI very important for them, says Deepak Pahwa, Group Chairman Pahwa Enterprise.

The cycle times are shorter and one needs to be able to predict ‘situations’ as well as respond quickly to them. It is a must for all SMEs to have BI to understand market trends for their products and services, he further adds.

Management based on key performance metrics is very important for SMEs particularly. The key resources are few, and there is a need for creating processes driven by metrics rather than needing the management resources to do micro-management all the time, says A Rajendran, Director, Information Services, Team Computers Pvt Ltd. He emphasises the importance of result orientation of which BI is an important element.

BI plays the role of a filter, which filters out the unnecessary details and brings up only the most important elements needing attention at any time. Sudipta K Sen, CEO & MD, SAS Institute (India) Pvt Ltd believes that BI enables enterprises to break through to a higher level of understanding and establish a culture of fact-based decision-making.

While large businesses have made it a mandate for their CMO or CIO to drive business transformation through BI Analytics, SMEs have started using BI for analysing simple business trends for making business decisions especially in marketing, sales and finance, asserts K Krishnamohan, Founder & CEO – Fifth C Solutions.

Dharti Desai, Founder and President, Regency Direct Marketing agrees. She says, “These days SMEs have also realised significant survival & financial benefits of accepting this important tool and the pivotal role of business intelligence platforms.”

Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft India says, “Though SMEs in India still have a long way to go on the IT adoption continuum compared to the large enterprises, an increasing number are beginning to see the value delivered by BI solutions, and we believe this is a trend that will continue.”

While Sen believes that today various business realities have led many organisations across verticals to adopt business intelligence applications. The objective is clear, these organisations want to gain greater insights from all the data generated by their operational and transactional systems.