Study of Extent of Usage of Business Intelligence (BI) Between Large Organizations & SMEs across Manufacturing & Service Sectors in Ahmedabad

Abstract

The fluctuating economic conditions and the pressures of competition force business owners and managers to try out many different performance improvement concepts and tools, often with mixed results. Business Intelligence (BI) is one such concept and tool which combines operational data with analytical tools to present complex and competitive information to planners and decision makers by improving the timeliness and quality of inputs to the decision process. Organizations adopt BI tools and information systems to learn from the past, control the present and predict the future. BI is used to understand the capabilities available in the firm; the state of the art trends, and future directions in the markets; the technologies, and the regulatory environment in which the firm competes; and the actions of competitors and the implications of these actions. The emergence of data warehouse as a repository, advancements in data cleansing, increased capabilities of hardware and software, and the emergence of analytics all combine to create a richer business intelligence environment. While large organizations are known to use BI, not much data is available about SMEs using BI for business benefits. This study compared the extent of usage of BI in SMEs and Large Organizations in Ahmedabad region across samples selected from the manufacturing and services sectors.