Using BI and Decision-Making Process in Start-ups

Successful BI projects are based on good content requirements profiles, which should be developed in a technical concept at the beginning of BI implementation. Due to the sometimes lacking know-how in the companies, it is useful here to draw on conceptual help from outside. There is little time for own staff aside from daily business for BI. Thus, the control and the success of a BI project are at risk. Well-functioning BI project coordination requires interdisciplinary competence between specialist knowledge (above all BI know-how) and leadership in the form of assertiveness, communication and coordination skills.

Key benefits of moving to BI solutions include better data integration, a combination of reporting and planning, and more significant flexibility and processing of large volumes of data.

A central success factor for a successful BI project is the involvement of the reporting and planning addressee in the preparation of the requirement profiles. A compact analysis of the current situation helps to get companies and their employees away from their point of view, to build on their strengths and thwart their weaknesses in the future. Another important success factor for a BI project is the specialist concept, which should contain all content, process, organizational and technical requirement profiles. Regarding contents, the value-adding and strategically relevant factors are to be identified. Also, content design and layout suggestions of the individual reports and the reporting structure and navigation in the reporting and planning system form important elements of the specialist concept. The technical content concept is the basis for the IT concept for the implementation of the BI solution. Above all, it was intended to determine the technical data sources of the upstream IT systems, to include a data supply concept and to describe the data modeling and query and report design technically.

The BI should not remain an isolated solution, then a data integration of all decision-relevant information from the variously available pre-systems is mandatory. The external support should be carried out according to the coaching principle and provide the necessary know-how transfer to BI for the project core team. As a result, the company remains independent of third parties in the medium term and can later develop the reporting system and plan within the company on its own. It often turns out that BI-based reporting and plan systems, which were high shaped by the employees themselves, are later better accepted and accepted by the company.

To secure the quality of the data, the introduction of suitable auxiliary instruments, e.g., To recommend reconciliation reports, account assignment and master data validations to be able to perform better plausibility checks and quality checks on the data. Also, software for verifying data quality is already being offered, using validation and transformation techniques such as parsing (syntax analysis). BI should not remain a tool for a select few, but the expansion of accessibility in BI-based reporting and planning should promote transparency, decision-making, and actionability throughout the company.

Reporting should go from compact core information to the top management level down to the decentralized decision-making areas in the enterprise and deliver decision-relevant financial and non-financial metrics to the controller. Data integration with BI makes the report generation and planning considerable shorten processes. Many manual processing steps in planning but also report preparation are eliminated by the data integration with BI, above all by the increased connection of the upstream systems.

Controlling as a central supporting body in the planning and reporting processes in the company uses more time for BI to prepare analyzes and to prepare prominent management comments and suggested measures for the management bodies. In addition, the admired Excel interface can remain as an integrative component in addition to new web-based application interfaces. Flexible analyzes help identify cause-and-effect relationships in the plant and its environment during live work in the system; this is supported by various output media and the many different access options to the information on portals, web access and mobile devices. The following table summarizes other benefits and disadvantages of using BI in start-ups.

Table 1: Benefits and Disadvantages of Using BI in Start-ups

The start-ups have the task, before and during the use of BI, to recognize their benefits and disadvantages and to discuss them openly. The benefits that are offered must be identified and taken so that they lead to both operational and strategic vantages. The detriments, which often appear as weak signals, must be perceived and combated by containing or preventing adverse effects. Ultimately, the competence of start-up management can be measured by the extent to which it has been able to exploit the advantages and reduce the disadvantages or avoid the negative effects. Not only economic criteria, which are reflected in productivity, cost and output variables, can be used as benchmarks.