New visualization capabilities are making it easier for mainstream operational users to digest the analytics, while integration with mobile devices makes the technology accessible to field personnel. Other emerging areas are search capabilities integrated within BI and the ability to overlay geographic information systems (GIS) with BI data for more refined analysis, experts say.
Other BI game changers are appliance technology, which greatly speeds up the response time for queries, and service-oriented architecture (SOA), which makes the technology more pervasive and accessible for building composite applications that bring together analytical and transactional components, according to Lothar Schubert, direction solution marketing for NetWeaver at SAP AG. In that vein, SAP offers the NetWeaver BI Accelerator, an in-memory, analytic "snap-in" appliance built with chip technology from Intel Corp. and storage and server technology from Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM, designed to vastly increase the speed of analyzing key business data.
With all of these enhancements, manufacturing companies are starting to evolve to the second stage of the maturity model for BI, according to AMR Research Inc. Stage one, where we have been, is taking a backward look at data. Stage two, the current benchmark for most manufacturers, is applying the data to get a view of where they are today. Stage three, the predictive planning piece, is looking at the data to see where to go in the future, and stage four is running the business as a performance culture — a stage to which few companies have advanced, says John Hagerty, AMR's vice president and research fellow.