Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations WHITE PAPER
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Table of Contents Executive Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Generate Enthusiasm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Create a Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Implement Your Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Align to Your Business Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Build Momentum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Introduction to the Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 SAS® BI Dashboard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Data Preparation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Sharing Insight Through Business Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Dashboards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Dragos Coles is a Systems Engineer at SAS. He supports the sales organization across industry verticals as a technical resource with a focus on analytics. Coles’ analytics experience comes from his previous work in the health care industry, where he was focused on clinical informatics analytics and medical informatics analytics. He has a BS in biochemistry and an MS in analytics from North Carolina State University. Lorrie Gallego is a Systems Engineer at SAS. She collaborates with customers, sales and product teams to promote SAS’ small and midsize business products. With 17 years of experience in statistics and teaching, she has gained knowledge in the application of statistics in various fields. Gallego has held teaching and statistical positions at the Peace Corps, Environmental Protection Agency, RTI International, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Greenville Technical College.
Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
Executive Summary Business intelligence (BI) has historically been the domain of large organizations with deep pockets. Smaller businesses were left with a more fractured view of their data – and without the advantage of forward-looking insights and analysis. Technology is advancing, however, and there is no reason small and midsize businesses (SMBs) should continue to use spreadsheets as a key reporting tool. Achieving success with BI tools isn’t instantaneous. There are steps all business must take to migrate from analyzing Excel spreadsheets to developing insightful business projections, or using advanced visualization tools. The end goal for quality BI is to generate insights that lead to smart business decisions. To get there, SMBs in particular should follow the steps in this paper to ensure success not only with the BI tools, but also with the process that ensures the tools are used effectively. The steps include everything from starting with a strong win, to ensuring your BI goals align with your business plan. This paper abolishes that “deep pockets” myth and shows you how to get started. Whether you are a midsize company or a small group within a larger organization, using SAS to implement business intelligence is within your reach.
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Getting Started “It is never the size of your problem that is the problem; it’s a lack of momentum. Without momentum, even a tiny obstacle can prevent you from moving forward. With momentum, you will navigate through problems and barely even notice them.” – John C. Maxwell, PhD, leadership expert and founder of The John Maxwell Company Your goals are unique. However, achieving them means using a less-unique, tested IT project management plan, and that you are ready to counter objections to change along the way. There are many outstanding books on that subject, but one key requirement for SMBs is to deliver a successful, high-impact project immediately. Delivering real value early in the process allows you to build momentum and overcome the bias held by some that BI is not the right fit for smaller businesses. So, how do you build enough momentum to tackle increasingly complex challenges? We have developed a framework to help: 1. Generate enthusiasm. 2. Create a plan. 3. Implement your plan. 4. Align to your business values. 5. Build momentum.
Generate Enthusiasm You need enthusiasm and buy-in from executives (ideally including a project “champion”), IT staff, direct management and those implementing the analytics and BI. If you are missing support from one or more of those parties, everyone else will have to work harder. Enthusiasm is the foundation for your success and will see the project through obstacles even without forward momentum. Enthusiasm should not be taken to the extreme, however. Do not let it create a false hope around misguided projects, because they can drain large amounts of time and money for little or no gain.
Create a Plan
A common, very useful,
Planning has two roles:
framework is to make your
1. Clearly identify business objectives.
goals SMART: specific,
2. Allocate resources to make things happen.
measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.
Creating a business objective is probably one of the trickiest parts of achieving success. A common, very useful, framework is to make your goals SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. All of these characteristics are critical to success.
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Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
For example, your management team may demand a dashboard that can report on the most critical metrics for maintaining the health of the business (these metrics are often called key performance indicators or “KPIs”). As a result, you could define a BI goal this way: Initial objective: Provide a management dashboard that will report key metrics and allow users to drill down into details. Upon further examination, this objective lacks – at minimum – the “specific” and “timely” characteristics of a SMART goal: • How will this dashboard be delivered? Via Excel attachments to an email? Or on a Web page? • What metrics are most critical to show? If these are metrics being evaluated against targets, what are those targets? • What is the target for delivery of the dashboard? • What kind of detailed data is most critical? This initial objective has one more flaw: We don’t know the underlying reason behind the development time and costs for building a dashboard. As it turns out, executives on this team routinely create and run their own reports. They never agree on whose numbers are right because everyone uses a different formula to arrive at their metrics. So, the motivation is not just to have the numbers, but creating one central set of numbers everyone can agree on is an accurate accounting of the state of the business. After clarifying the business goals and expectations, you could revise the objective like this:
Remember, momentum is your initial goal; the credibility you receive from solving small problems will build support for larger challenges.
Revised objective: By Aug. 1, provide a definitive list of metrics in the dashboard, along with relevant targets for each metric and exact formulas for how those metrics are defined. By Sept. 1, have a working, Web-based dashboard that shows these metrics and lets managers drill into their territories to view their performance. This is much better, although there are certainly still questions to be resolved in the planning process. Lastly, we cannot emphasize enough that you need to start by selecting just one or two projects that will have an immediate, highly visible impact on the organization and can be completed quickly. It’s a cliché, but you really do need to go after the low-hanging fruit. Remember, momentum is your initial goal; the credibility you receive from solving small problems will build support for larger challenges.
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Implement Your Plan This step of the process is actually covered in the rest of this paper. Implementation requires the right technology, staff and training to make the project a success.
Align to Your Business Values With enthusiasm, planning and hard work, you should arrive at a good prototype that demonstrates how your analytics and BI project will deliver value. Next, you must get detailed feedback from key stakeholders about how to modify this prototype to best meet the needs of the organization. And do not fool yourself; it does not matter how pretty or statistically significant your output is. Once the users and decision makers see it, they will have questions and want changes. This kind of feedback is good – it means they have enthusiasm for the process, too. Specifically on the BI side, make sure your reports clearly empower better decision making. Without a clear connection between reporting and better decisions, a project might get off the ground but will not stay in the air for long.
Build Momentum As you complete projects that are relevant (as defined earlier in this paper) and visible, you will build momentum to tackle more complex challenges. Large, game-changing applications of analytics can reshape your organization, but those must be preceded by a number of smaller wins that over time create a culture of data-driven decision making.
Introduction to the Tools “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra In this paper, we will look at three central tools that fall under the umbrella of SAS Business Intelligence: SAS® Enterprise Guide®, SAS BI Dashboard and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. Below is a brief introduction to each of these tools. You may wish to refer back to this section as we walk through some specific uses of these tools in the remainder of the paper.
SAS® Enterprise Guide® SAS Enterprise Guide is a bit of a “Swiss army knife”; in other words, it can do many different things very well. SAS Enterprise Guide can handle data preparation, analytics and reporting as an ad hoc tool. It can also extend beyond ad hoc reporting into automating the BI implementation process and providing enterprise access. Using SAS Enterprise Guide requires building out visual process flows through the use of pointand-click tasks that handle specific pieces of a larger goal. You do not need any prior SAS or computer programming knowledge to use SAS Enterprise Guide, and you can pick up all the major functionality in roughly two days of training. Figure 1 (below) shows a sample process flow in SAS Enterprise Guide to import Excel data, join it to two database tables, build a chart and cross-tabular report and, finally, combine the chart and table into a single report. 4
Without a clear connection between reporting and better decisions, a project might get off the ground but will not stay in the air for long.
Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
Figure 1: Process flow using SAS Enterprise Guide.
Users who do not need a dedicated tool for data preparation and enterprise reporting may be better suited to SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, which gives you many of the same point-and-click features within the familiar layout of Microsoft Excel.
SAS速 BI Dashboard SAS BI Dashboard is a Web-based application used to design and display dashboards. Everyone from executives to front-line employees can monitor KPIs, drill into details and view trends using nothing but a Web browser.
Figure 2: Sample Web-based dashboard built using SAS BI Dashboard.
Users need minimal training to view and click through a dashboard since it is an intuitive, Web-based application. Dashboard developers use a point-and-click Web interface to build and modify dashboards that lets them control placement of indicators, linking and other details. Learning to design dashboards requires no prior SAS or computer programming knowledge and takes approximately two days of training.
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SAS速 Add-In for Microsoft Office SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office can enhance the value of Microsoft Office products like Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, SharePoint and Communicator. You can go beyond the row limitations and ad hoc nature of Microsoft Office to design and refresh analyses for local or server-based data sources.
Figure 3: Sales forecast created in Microsoft Excel using SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. You can update this chart monthly to see the most recent numbers with a single click.
SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office is appropriate for business users who want to design reports in Microsoft Office that can easily be shared and refreshed. Viewing results requires no special training since everything is delivered within the tools you already know. With one day of training, you can learn to design reports using the point-and-click SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.
Data Preparation Blueprint: 1. A process of photographic printing, used chiefly in copying architectural and mechanical drawings, which produces a white line on a blue background. 2. A detailed outline or plan of action: a blueprint for success. This paper creates a kind of blueprint to guide you toward success in your environment. The starting point for this success is data preparation, which includes access, validation, quality and manipulation.
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Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
So, why the need to prepare data? Can’t you just have at it? The reality of good business intelligence is that the data that helps build reporting – and ultimately leads to better decisions – is rarely suitable for immediate use. Often, small and midsize organizations store data in many different formats (SQL server, text files, ERP systems) at various locations around the enterprise. Critical business metrics like profit often need to be calculated from existing columns. Time-based analysis like year-to-date or year-over-year data often requires special filtering. Many organizations are used to doing this through tedious Excel-based techniques like VLOOKUP functions. SAS can simplify this process using any number of data sources, no row limitations and – most critically – in a manner that can be automated through scheduling. Access to databases can include the ability to both read and write directly to and from that database. After accessing the data, data validation and quality involves profiling the data to make sure it accurately reflects reality and has the depth you need for reporting. If everyone knows a particular division reached $2 million in sales last year, it would be useless to design a report based on data that showed $4 million in total sales. SAS Enterprise Guide is a good tool for doing this sort of validation since it has point-and-click tasks that allow you to conduct rudimentary profiling of columns, see the frequency of values and more.
Figure 4: Column profiling within SAS Enterprise Guide.
There is a wealth of point-and-click tools at your disposal for cleaning and transforming data. This includes traditional SQL functionality as well as a library of more than 500 SAS functions. There are additional SAS procedures that go beyond standard SQL for creating random samples and table transpositions. Typical data preparation will involve one to four steps, as shown by the import and join in Figure 1 near the beginning of this paper, although there is no limit on the number of preparation steps needed. Best of all, when you need to repeat this process, SAS Enterprise Guide lets you schedule (or run on demand) any process flow, eliminating the need to repeat tedious data preparation tasks. You can even get a little more advanced and swap out the input data sources if you have different data extracts that need the same basic processing time and time again.
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Ultimately, data preparation lays the foundation for enterprise reports (such as a strategic dashboard) that are often expected from BI initiatives. However, data preparation also lays the foundation for self-service reporting. SAS Business Intelligence tools such as SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office allow the user to unleash charting, statistical analysis and many more methods of reporting on enterprise data sources.
Sharing Insight Through Business Intelligence The goal of all BI is to help users make better decisions, plain and simple. All the drilldown and fancy graphics in the world are useless if they do not help people better understand the problems and opportunities that require action in an organization. Don’t give executives a dashboard if they only want a cross-tabular report in Excel. Within the framework of SAS BI for Midsize Business, there are a multitude of options for sharing insight, including: • Dashboards. • Tasks within SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). • Ad hoc reports from SAS Enterprise Guide. The table below summarizes some general rules for selecting an appropriate reporting type for the task at hand. This is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of reporting options, and should prepare you to start thinking about the wealth of options and advantages the different methods entail. Let each BI project guide your choice of reporting types, rather than trying to use only one technique to suit every situation.
The table below shows selected reporting types and how to use them.
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Reporting Type
Works well for:
Not as useful for:
Dashboards
Key insights decision makers should monitor on a daily basis and share visually with large groups.
Reports for single individuals, reports that change often or need fast turnaround.
Tasks within SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office
Information that people want to see in Excel, Word or PowerPoint; charts that can easily refresh as data changes; or self-service reporting.
Reports that need data preparation upfront or people who want to create reports with a Web browser.
Ad hoc reports from SAS Enterprise Guide
Reports that need data preparation and data import upfront, reports that use SAS programming code, or ad hoc requests that need to be answered quickly.
Reports that users can interact with and easily modify.
Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
There are a number of excellent papers and books covering each of these in detail. In this paper, we demonstrate two reporting types – dashboards and tasks within SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office – in order to build some reporting that would be useful to a small or midsize organization looking for a quick BI victory.
Dashboards When we talk to organizations about BI, everyone asks about dashboards. Some are more dashboard-driven than others; but in general, the dashboard buzz has really caught on and become a must-have in the BI arsenal. Within SAS Business Intelligence, the SAS BI Dashboard Web application helps users build attractive, interactive dashboards that excel at showing both traditional BI as well as analytical results. For a small or midsize organization, you can use a dashboard to: 1. Monitor performance at aggregate and individual levels. 2. Report on analytical insight like customer segmentation, forecasts and the success of marketing campaigns. 3. Serve as a launch point for other relevant reports. With the data in hand, SAS BI Dashboard gives us a wealth of capabilities for plotting this information. There are more than 25 prebuilt display types for each indicator in the dashboard, including KPI displays, forecast charts and interactive bar charts. Figure 5 below contains a portion of the indicators available from SAS BI Dashboard. Each one is easy to configure in the Web environment to build out your overall dashboard.
Figure 5: Indicator display types in SAS BI Dashboard.
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As an example, we could plot the performance of two marketing campaigns over time using a dual line chart. The first step, as previously discussed, is to prepare data to include the performance of both campaigns over time stored in a single table or collection of related tables. The data can then be selected directly from a query and configured to fit the chart type in question. An illustration of this appears below in Figure 6.
All the drill-down and fancy graphics in the world are useless if they do not help people better understand the problems and opportunities that require action in an organization.
Figure 6: Dual line plot indicator.
As you build out other indicators, you can ultimately arrange those down to the pixel into a complete dashboard as shown in Figure 2 near the beginning of this paper. You can also allow drill-down capabilities by linking your indicators to other indicators, dashboards or reports. Demonstrating these elements is beyond the scope of this paper, but they can be handled by using the point-and-click capabilities built into SAS BI Dashboard – no coding required1.
SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office “Until I see it in Excel, it’s not real to me.” – Business executive Microsoft Office is the foundation for creating and sharing information in the vast majority of organizations. SAS helps you to take the best of what Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook can do and supplement that with additional capabilities to handle large data, design and apply analytics, automatically refresh charts and much more. This paper focuses on reporting and illustrates how executives surface the most recent numbers automatically through a PowerPoint presentation.
1 Learn how to design both a basic and sophisticated dashboard. Enroll in Creating BI Dashboards Using SAS 9.2. support.sas.com/edu/schedules.html?ctry=us&id=1189
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Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
First, we review the data we want to chart from Microsoft Excel. This is accomplished by using the SAS data button from SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. If your data is stored centrally on the server, SAS can provide consistent access to it via Excel with no additional setup required. You can view as much or as little data as you want in either tabular format or within a pivot table. Because the data processing is server-based, you never need to fear Excel row limitations again! Figure 7 shows the results from using the SAS data feature when you are looking at a particular data set with forecasting information.
Figure 7: Data values loaded into Excel using SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.
We have historical sales information for the previous year along with six months of forecasts. Using SAS Enterprise Guide, the table above also includes the previous year’s sales as an additional column. We would like to plot this information in PowerPoint, which is easy when using the built-in tasks of SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. A task is a graphical interface that guides you through a particular type of analysis (for example, constructing a line plot). Figure 8 lists some of the available tasks in SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. Incidentally, most of these tasks also appear in SAS Enterprise Guide.
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Figure 8: Graph tasks in SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.
Using the line plot task, we can select variables for the horizontal and vertical axes. We also have complete control over the line style: colors, solid or dashed, markers and so on. Virtually any standard feature for chart creation is here, and since the data is stored centrally, the chart can be refreshed with the touch of a button as the data changes over time.
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Making It Happen: A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Business Intelligence in Small and Midsize Organizations
Figure 9 shows the resulting plot with our forecast data. While Excel can natively generate comparable plots, the refresh capability of SAS can save hours of building and rebuilding similar charts each week and month for review.
Figure 9: Results from the line plot task.
If you need to pull a chart into a PowerPoint slide, you can easily move it using the “manage content” feature shown in Figure 10. This maintains the same data links and ability to modify any part of the graph through the task interface.
Figure 10: The “send to” dialog box within SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.
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We can refresh these charts as the data changes by clicking “refresh” in SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. Even better, we can automate the refresh process so that a PowerPoint copy of the most recent numbers is stored on a network drive or emailed weekly or daily. How powerful would it be to know that even if a snowstorm hits, a PowerPoint with the current numbers will be emailed to your executive team at 8 a.m. every Monday morning?
Conclusion SAS software lets you to create a high-performing analytics and business intelligence environment, even for small and midsize organizations. SAS has packages specifically for small and midsize organizations that will let you get started and “make it happen” with budgets in mind. By properly setting your goals, you can build momentum to continually tackle larger projects and build a data-driven organization. There is a wealth of options for analytics at your disposal, such as Web-based dashboards and integration with Microsoft Office. Now, all you have to do is follow our blueprint to create real, lasting value for your organization – no matter the size.
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About SAS SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 60,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ®. For more information on SAS® Business Analytics software and services, visit sas.com.
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