This month we’re taking a look at Birst, Infor’s cloud based Business Intelligence (BI) tool. With more businesses looking to get more accurate information from their data, an effective BI solution is becoming a must.

In this blog, Garth, one of our Technical Consultants, gives us a high-level overview as to why this Infor product should be on your radar.

Why do I need to use BI software in my business?

Business Intelligence as a solution is not a new concept, in fact, it’s been around for quite a while! Many of you will remember products such as Cognos, Crystal Reports and others being a feature that many ERP and CRM solution providers bolted on to their offerings to extend the reporting capabilities of their software.

These days, things have moved on at a pace, with more and more business owners looking to the next generation of BI solutions to drive their business decisions, with many excellent solutions in the BI marketplace.

Speed, accuracy and flexibility of reporting are high on the list of must-haves for many organisations. With analytics being at the heart of most businesses, it really doesn’t matter if you’re a director or out on the shop floor, you will be able to access the information you need when you need it.

 

So what is Birst?

Infor is one of the few ERP vendors to offer a built in BI solution, with full integration to SyteLine core data with ready made dashboards available for use.

Birst uses different processes to help organisations get a comprehensive 360-degree view of vital business data, which in turn allows users to make key decisions extremely quickly.  Modern BI moves away from traditional static reporting that usually leads to more questions, slow response times and tends to require major input from an IT department.  Instead, modern BI is much more user friendly, displaying information in easy-to-understand visualisations, making spotting crucial insights much easier, as well as allowing the user to query the data directly rather than having their IT team do it.

Using Birst and combining the processes of data visualisation, data preparation, reporting, running queries and many more, allows users to interact with their data in real time.  The opportunities of working like this are endless.  You can quickly adapt to seasonal trends, identify bottleneck areas, see your top performers and as a result drive change throughout your business.

Birst uses networked analytics to help create a centralised data source and bridge the gap between IT owned data sources along with typical user owned data silos such as Excel spreadsheets. This allows for a full collaboration of data and truly gives users all the required information they are seeking.

Birst also offers the ability to make industry specific decisions.  With its direct connection into Infor SyteLine, users are able to gain insights into their supply chain by gaining valuable insight into measures of supply and demand, inventory levels and order status/turnaround.

Why should we use Birst?

Birst can help businesses make better and more informed decisions using real time and historical data.  Users can easily interrogate data and get their questions answered, making the whole process more efficient. Here are some of the ways Birst can help you make data driven decisions:

  • See seasonal trends
  • Track top performing products
  • Highlight ways to increase profits
  • Streamline production processes
  • Get a deeper understanding of your customers and their requirements
  • Improve employee performance

Birst also allows you to make these decisions whilst away from your desk.  With the power of mobile BI, you can access the same datasets and drill into the information in the same way from your phone or tablet as you can from your desktop PC.

We hope that this blog has shown why we think that Birst is a great addition to your SyteLine installation.  If you’re interested in seeing for yourself just how Birst can help you get more out of SyteLine, then please get in touch.