A business analysis tool for the strategic advantage of small enterprises

Abstract

Deriving business value from an enterprise's historic data with the use of Business Intelligence (BI) tools is an ever-growing phenomenon which offers valuable strategic advantage in today's challenging and competitive market. However, being a costly, complex and time-consuming process, the chances of successfully implementing a BI tool in micro and small enterprise are very scarce. This Final Year Project (FYP) is a methodological study about the possibility of introducing the concepts of BI and business analytics to the small business market by developing a business analysis tool which is flexible to cater for different types of businesses and specifically designed to be affordable and usable by the micro and small business users. Such an application would require a simple interface; have no dependency on a data warehouse, but yet offering proper BI functionalities. Such a design would make it possible for every IT- literate person to utilize it, without the need of any applied BI knowledge or any advanced IT skills. However, this has required a change from the usual approach of implementing and deploying a BI infrastructure. In order to deliver a usable and user-friendly business analysis tool to non-IT personnel, priority had to be given to the user experience just as much as the technology itself. The final proposed application - OwlishSAM - is a business analysis tool exclusively aimed at the micro and small business users; offering user-friendly and interactive querying, analysis and reporting features in real-time, together with trend analysis and sales forecasting capabilities.