This stage can also include automating certain decision rules. For example, an analysis of historical manufacturing capacity and demand patterns can be used to route orders to manufacturing facilities based on automated algorithms.

As with many organizations, the current system of allocating expenses found in the general ledger (G/L) system down to service lines, channels, customers, and so forth generates cost accounting information in which the organization’s managers have no confidence.

In other cases, the specific purchasing behavior of targeted individual consumers in response to a direct marketing campaign can be identified.

One client several years ago had a need for richer demographic data in order to better profile and understand customer behavior. Rather than putting in place efforts to add to the data currently available about customers, an effort was underway to reduce the amount of available customer data to shorten the length of time and cost required to take

For any given company, the choice of business design dictates the performance objectives of core business processes and the elements of business performance that are important to plan, measure, control, and improve.

Existing organizational constructs for governance that can be used to support BI program-level efforts ranging from data stewardship, data architecture, meta-data management to technical standards

The portfolio also includes transactional applications-the systems that the company uses to conduct transactions with or for the benefit of customers.

Common symptoms of organizations that do not adequately pay attention to and fund architectures phase activities are as follows: • BI projects that are not explicitly aligned to supporting business goals • Capital expenditures for BI projects that don’t deliver an ROI • Stove-piped BI applications that provide different answers to the same question

For consumer product manufacturers, channels include both distribution channels (how the product gets to the store) and the different types of retail stores.