ERP Internals/Modules/Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP, analytics, Data Mining, business performance management, benchmarks, text mining, and predictive analytics. Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making.

H. P. Luhn, in writing on business intelligence systems (1958), wrote “The system described here employs rather advanced design techniques and the question arises as to how far way such systems may be from realization.” The system needed techniques much more advanced. He noted:

"The availability of documents in machine-readable form is a basic requirement of the system. Typewriters with paper-tape punching attachments are already used extensively in information processing and communication operations. Their use as standard equipment in the future would provide machine-readable records of new information. The transcription of old records would pose a problem, since in most cases it would be uneconomical to perform this job by hand. The mechanization of this operation will therefore have to wait until print-reading devices have been perfected (Luhn 1958)"

Business intelligence systems existed in theory before there was the ability to implement them in practice. H.P. Luhn envisioned the possibilities of a business intelligence system before the hardware of software existed to implement the system.

Business Intelligence analyzes the enterprise data and presents reports and graphs. Generally, the form of the analysis is specified at the time of the analysis. Only large ERP packages have a Business Intelligence module.


 * Functions
 * Reports

BI Tools and Concepts
Business Intelligence seeks to turn data into intelligence to help managers make better decisions. The process of extracting data from business processes and converting this into a useful format requires many tools and concets. Some of the major ones are list below.


 * Data Modeling
 * Data Warehouse, Data Mart and Spreadsheets
 * Extract, transform, load
 * Reporting and querying software
 * OLAP
 * Digital Dashboards
 * Data Mining
 * Process mining
 * Business performance management

Data Exchange
Business Intelligence does not exchange transactions with other modules.

Transactions
Business Intelligence does not have transactions.

Business Intelligence