Business Intelligence: An Undeniable Tool for Management Control

Whatever its size or sector of activity, a company operating in a turbulent environment must have the right information at the right time to implement its strategy. This information enables the company to act, react, position itself and evaluate itself. It must therefore seek, sort, analyze and disseminate the mass of information that gravitates around it.

Indeed, the last two decades have seen a rapid growth in the adoption by companies of tools enabling them to collect, process, store and disseminate large volumes of information that can be a real competitive advantage, quickly and at low cost. This is the emergence of Business Intelligence.

Rapid evolution of tools and methods, modification of external repositories: the management controller’s ecosystem is aging. Certain symptoms are not deceiving: piling up of reports, difficulty in meeting deadlines, difficulty in publishing results, recourse to external consultants, and multiplication of Excel spreadsheets… All these phenomena undermine performance. BI has thus entered the arena with the promise of integrating all the necessary data sources and giving managers, especially management controllers, well-analyzed and truthful information on which to base their decisions. The sooner the answer is provided, the sooner the search for the solution can begin.

BI is thus an asset for :

1. Securing your data

By launching a BI project, the financial controller makes his data a priority correlated to the company’s performance, and sets up a real standards policy. They can be audited, cleaned and streamlined. Betting on a BI consultant will thus be a real winning investment so that the whole company can draw on a reliable and homogeneous raw material for all.

2. Enrich your data

Internal data is, of course, at the heart of the challenges. However, the increasingly competitive economic context is pushing the financial controller to enrich his database to integrate exogenous data. The latter will refine decision-making based on competition figures (market shares), but also operational and commercial data (order books, production speed and volumes, etc.).

3. Boost its processes

The formula is classic: the financial controller is a “Business partner”. He is integrated into the decision-making processes and works transversally with the different business lines. The use he makes of data is used for decision-making: it is this strategic role that makes him a major co-pilot.

Today, this role is pushed further by technological innovations. More and more management controllers are using innovative processes, with much faster reporting frequencies on a monthly rather than quarterly basis. This “simplification” of the budget process is a major evolution: more agile, more reactive, more alert, well-equipped financial controllers present a competitive advantage for their company.

4. Revaluing one’s profession

The loss of time related to the extraction, collection, management or consolidation of data is a crucial reason to equip oneself with a BI solution.

According to a recent study conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC), an employee would lose 5 hours a week searching for relevant information about his business. This phenomenon exacerbate work for the financial controller who manually compiles Excel spreadsheets and must deal with the expansion of data volumes.

Delegating and working hand in hand with ISD is the first virtuous reflex to have. Moreover, data extraction and consolidation are tasks that are perfectly managed by a BI tool, with first levels of reporting that can be automated, which will also contribute to a certain degree of personal fulfillment. Freed from thankless tasks, the financial controller will be able to devote himself to the most rewarding and demanding part of his job: analysis and consulting.

5. Becoming an information prescriber

By presenting dashboards and indicators that have an impact and are readable to top management, the financial controller will give more weight to his advisory force. An agile solution will enable him to restitute complex data in an intelligible way, encouraging decision-making.

Moreover, by integrating exogenous data, the financial controller can challenge himself by identifying new forms of optimization or new opportunities for the company (moving from a sales model to a service model, for example). He then becomes a force of proposal in the evolution of the business model.

Finally, rather than just “accountability”, management control needs to take on a greater share of governance of activities and resources. As a true prescriber of information, the management controller identifies the relevant data (rather than reporting it exhaustively), and must above all integrate into his practices the arrival of real time information within the Finance Department. Invoicing and accounting available on the Cloud, online order taking by clients that upsets and accelerates the chain… Reporting to the company as well as to investors becomes a live mission that adapts to all these factors; a challenge that requires more adaptation and modernization of management control.

References

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Baars, Henning and Kemper, Hans-George (2008), Management Support with Structured and Unstructured Data—An Integrated Business Intelligence Framework Information Systems Management, 25:2, 132 —148.
Raphael Grytz Business Intelligence & Analytics Cost Accounting: Review and Synthesis of the Literature. Universität Paderborn Artus Krohn-Grimberghe Universität Paderborn
Li, S., Shue, L. and Lee, S. (2008).Business Intelligence approach to supporting strategy-making of ISP service management, Expert Systems with Applications 35: 739– 754.
Oskou, V. Soltani, M. (2012), A model to promote Business Intelligence and knowledge management approach, National Conference of entrepreneurship and business management knowledge-based, Tehran.