SMBs need BI, too!

BI is not just for big companies!

Over the last six or seven years, I've been involved in providing and implementing Business Intelligence technologies to clients in small businesses. Sometimes, we didn't call it 'BI', but in most cases it really was.

In recent years, many vendors have come forward to talk about having BI 'solutions' (uuggh - I hate that term) for SMBs, but the problem is that they tend to forget the 'S' in SMB. What about the business that doesn't do $300M p.a. in sales?

The reality is that those (not so) small businesses, can definitely reap great benefits from a well thought-out BI implementation. The key is in finding a good place to create value.

Example #1: One of our clients is a distributor of Pet Foods to retailers across Eastern Canada. Their products are sold to independents, large chains, and to several buying groups. They have a team of salespeople, and seem to have order-entry staff working constantly.

The Problem: With such a diverse sales channel, how can you effectively monitor sales for allocation to the appropriate salesrep? Also, with a significant opportunity to receive Vendor rebates based on product and Geo performance, how can you create valid reports to support claims?

How did we solve this? Well, not suprisingly for a business of this size in this market, we didn't build a comprehensive Enterprise Data Warehouse. We didn't implement costly ETL technology platforms, nor did we develop a model requiring dedicated staff FTE resources.

Before recommending a large-scale project of dubious value and return, we took some time to understand both the client's business and the value that could be realized from automating this manual process - how much time was going into doing this manually? How many days per month? We worked with them to determine the repercussions of 'hiccups' in processing - what would be the implications downtime for the system? And we collaborated with them in finding the best balance between budget, timeliness, and fault-tolerance.

In the end, we implement a collection of easily maintained, highly reliable SQL transformation jobs, in conjunction with BusinessObjects Crystal Reports Server. Total cost to the client? Well, let's just say that over the past four years, they have saved the cost of implementing and maintaining this system several times over. They can consistently recover rebates from their vendors. And in addition, they now have a reliable sales information repository!!!

So how does this relate to my initial point, about BI for SMBs? Quite simply, it is not always a matter of considering a large scale project, spanning all aspects of a business, in order to achieve value from Business Intelligence. Implementing BI definitely has a cost, as does any technology. But the issue is to find appropriate ways to offset that cost by generating business value. At some later date, I will no doubt reference the intangible value of Business Intelligence. But for now, let's remember that it is quite possible to justify BI in any size of business.

You don't need to be a global giant to find an ROI.