Organizations in business for any length of time have likely navigated good – and bad – economic conditions. Interestingly management challenges exist in both environments. Yet, most decision-makers would agree that it takes much greater organizational maturity to weather a negative economic climate.

Think about it this way: In a strong economy companies face considerably less risk from poor decisions, under-performing assets, talent gap, and fat back office operations. In a tightening economy, however, organizations with bloated operating structures tend to be punished by shareholders, suppliers and especially competitors.

Without question, weathering a downturn depends, in part on visionary leadership. But choosing the right strategy is easier when your decision makers have access to robust insight that paints a complete and accurate picture of corporate performance. To gain this insight, they require the ability to monitor all key performance indicators in near real time.

John Hagerty, VP and research fellow at AMR Research, agrees “A company that has insight into its operations and its customers has an advantage over companies that don’t,” he says. “That is especially true during times

Business intelligence (BI) refers to knowledge, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business to acquire a better understanding of market trends, customer behaviors and business insight. For this purpose it undertakes the collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information.

Every year organizations gather and store increasing amounts of data. Mid-size organizations tell us that, on average, they have a minimum of 7 operational data sources. These sources contain data the business users often want to tap into, in order to make the best decisions to steer the business in the right direction.

BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data already gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support the use of this information by assisting in the extraction, analysis, and reporting of information. Common functionality of business intelligence applications includes reporting, analytics, dashboards, scorecards, data mining, corporate performance management (CPM), and predictive analysis. BI applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management, trends and customer behaviors.

The business intelligence space is dominated by a number of integrated offering vendors lead by IBM (Cognos), Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Information Builders, SAS and MicroStrategy in addition to a very large number of smaller niche players.

On-Track Arabia is in an ideal position to help its customers develop and implement innovative business strategies .. let us help you through the bad times an