Category: Business

Quick Copy! Tips for Freelance Writers to Increase Income & Output (Part II of II)

The following is a continuation of the six tips I outline for increasing freelancing writing income and output in yesterday’s post. Without further ado:

4. Series: As in, split longer articles into Part I, Part II, etc. I like writing series for two reasons: i) I get more legs out of one subject; ii) I sell more, which can lead to more work from a publication.

After all, if a publisher likes your work enough to buy a series from you, they’ll probably be open to working with you on a more regular basis. This works well for publishers in some instances because, like a cliffhanger on a TV series, it keeps their readers coming back.

5. Write What You Don’t Know (In Bits): Eventually, you are going to run short on topics you know about – especially if you are in the habit of producing a certain volume of work.

Writing about what you don’t know broadens your body of work and your knowledge base. Researching a piece will usually lead to ideas for more articles.

NOTE: Writing about what you don’t know is going to take more time than writing about what you know. So, you will be producing less. To counteract this, write about what you don’t know in pieces. Eg, research it over a few days so as not to take away from your output too severely.

6. Write Tech: This type of writing usually pays more. The reason I single out this genre, rather than say, medicine, is that most use technology. We just don’t think about it because it is so commonplace.

You’d be amazed at how many people don’t know simple things you may take for granted. Eg, adding a signature to your email, saving pictures from a digital camera onto a computer, downloading songs into an iPod, etc.

I was listening to Z100, a popular radio station in Atlanta, a few weeks ago and I heard the host of the show, Bert, say that he had no clue how to download songs from the Internet. You’d think that if anyone would know this, it would be someone like him.

I got an iPod for Christmas, and I’m clueless as to how to download songs into (onto?) it? See, I don’t even know which phrase fits. Until my 13-year-old nephew gets time in his busy schedule for his Auntie, that’s just going to have to wait.

My point, you just never know who needs the information you take for granted. So, don’t take the tech knowledge you do have for granted. Make it pay – and do the rest of us a favor. “Loading Your iPod” – article anyone?

LinkedIn – The Power Of Networking

With the introduction of social media in the last five or so years, networking and expanding your relevancy in your community has never been more productive. Unlike most advertising and media, social media enables you to create a two-way communication with your network contacts and potential customers. Therefore, the more email addresses, connections, fans, etc. that you can capture in your database, the easier it will be to communicate within your community.

Social media doesn’t just give you information, but rather, interacts with you while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for comments, letting you vote on an article, or communicating an RSVP for an upcoming event. In the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, these social media sites can become big “catcher’s mitts”, enabling you to use these portals as repositories of information.

Proactively embracing social media is both an efficient and effective way to expand your overall brand awareness in your trade area and communities. One social media portal is that can be an excellent source for business networking within your community is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is an Internet-based business-contact network that enables you to connect to key businesspeople in your trade area. LinkedIn allows you to identify key local contacts in your trade, geography, civic organizations and corporations — then gives you the ability to “connect” with them by sending a LinkedIn connection invitation. You also can join industry-related groups on LinkedIn and post comments on industry topics. LinkedIn is available for a fee but most, if not all the functionality can be accessed for free.

One of the strongest social media sites for networking professionals, LinkedIn has over 100 million members and growing rapidly focused mainly on business-to-business networking in contrast to Facebook, which is more social in nature. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted business contacts (and their networks) and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals — many of which are with people that are 2 and 3 degrees removed from you.

The premise of LinkedIn is that the larger your network of contacts, the better positioned you are in order to garner referrals – either directly or indirectly. Referrals from LinkedIn are commonplace and since this social media portal is built from professionals that actively seek to network, new connections are generally open to expanding their contacts.

Here is the how the site works and how you can maximize its effectiveness:

Profile: Each person on LinkedIn creates a personal profile that can be made visible to all 100 million users. The profile is basically an online “resume” of your current and previous work so that others can see your background. In order to maximize your exposure, filling out your profile in detail is critical and should include:

  • Complete background
  • List key words
  • Recommendations from others
  • Relevant industry groups

After you create your profile, you can start to add people to your “network” as connections. These direct connections (1st degree) are key colleagues that you know personally. You connect to these colleagues by sending them an invitation to “join your network”. Once you are connected to a direct contact, you become connected to their contacts as well. These contacts are not directly accessible to you, but rather viewed as 2nd and 3rd degree contacts that can be reached through your 1st degree contact.

Home Page: LinkedIn is designed with a cumulative landing page, or home page, that enables you to get a snapshot of all the activity related to your full network on one page. Think of this as command central for your network. Once you have an established network, this is an excellent place to come to every day to review opportunities in a concise fashion. Unlike other social media portals that require more time maintenance, simply spending 5-10 minutes a day here will keep you at the epicenter of activity for your network. Included on your home page are a number of key hotspots:

  • Connections: You can review all of the status updates of connections in your network as well as seeing new people that join LinkedIn that may be of interest to you to invite to your network.

  • Status Updates: This is a nice area that enables you to stay on top of the activities of your connections. See a new job title for a colleague – and send them a quick congrats message; read about a new connection in your network – reach out to them with a comment. The more you are active with your connections, the more that will put you in high esteem as an epicenter networker.

  • Recommendations: As you write or receive recommendations, they are posted on your profile and home page for all to see. What better way to establish credibility in your network then to have a third-party endorse your work. In addition, as you assemble recommendations on your profile, these can later be used as testimonials in relevant marketing campaigns for your use.

  • Group Status: When you begin to join groups (highly recommended as you will see below) you can monitor all the activities of your groups on your home page. This is advantageous to see as there are a number of discussions, new members, postings, etc. that can flag you to opportunities. Groups offer you the best way to really capitalize on growing your network with people that have relevant backgrounds and geographies.

  • People You May Know: This section appears daily and is an excellent area to expand your network with the ability to directly send a short introduction as well as an invite to connect. All of the people that appear here are already in your network, just not 1st degree connections.

  • Profile Views: Profile updates, photos, status, discussions, group activities and recent connections are all shown on your home page to keep you informed of changes with your connections. It is quite amazing what you can see transform here and in some cases, it can give you “insider” information on people and companies. For instance, changes in a connection’s overall profile may signal an imminent job change or changes to multiple profiles at the same company, can indicate unrest at that company.

  • Q & A: This section is an excellent way to showcase your expertise in a myriad of topics. The Q & A section can be customized to your background and as you answer questions, the questioner can assign the “best answer” classification to your answer. When this happens, you begin to position yourself as an expert in your field and this will foster more people to flock to you. Ultimately, every aspect of your activities on LinkedIn can cast you in the epicenter of activity coming and going.

Connections: Establishing your initial network is easy with LinkedIn. Starting at your home page, select “add connections” from the tab at the top of the page. From there you can go a few ways: a) send invites to people you already have email addresses; or b) have LinkedIn find them for you. If you are using any of the following email accounts – Hotmail.com, Gmail.com, yahoo.com, AOL.com, Outlook or Apple mail – you can automatically have LinkedIn search your databases to find out which of your contacts may already be on LinkedIn. LinkedIn will identify all those email addresses that are in your contact lists; people that you have received emails from; as well as people you have sent emails to. After a few minutes, you will be presented with a long list of potential connections that will be flagged if they are currently a member or LinkedIn or not. In either case, you may invite them to connect.

In addition, LinkedIn will allow you to look for former work colleagues from previous companies where you were in employed. These colleagues can be sent an invite, even if you do not have their current email address. Select “colleagues” from the same “add connections” page and click on your former companies to find potentially connections from the past.

Building up your contact list is critical, because the more 1st degree connections you have will lead to having more 2nd and 3rd degree connections. That is the start of building a larger overall network through your direct contact base. But, you shouldn’t stop there. Groups are an excellent way to expand your network to the real value of LinkedIn – connecting to people that you don’t know but SHOULD know.

Groups: Groups are the mother lodes of connection-building on LinkedIn. Unlike other ways to connect in which you need the person’s email address, groups can open up the door to creating connections directly through messaging. The first step to maximizing your reach through groups is to search for relevant groups that make sense for you to join. You can conduct your search on the “groups” tab and type in keywords in order to find groups. Once you find a number of groups, send a request to the group organizer and they should approve you within 24 hours.

Once approved to join the group, you will have the ability to view discussions, news, jobs and most importantly, the members. In addition, you will have the ability to sort by geography – i.e. 25 miles surrounding a zip code, for instance. Building your network within the group is simple to achieve. Within the group (and with the free version of LinkedIn), you can see the top 500 members based on the number of connections they have. Although there is a feature that members can use that turns off the ability to send them a direct message, very few users on LinkedIn prohibit direct messaging. Direct messaging is critical because it gives you the opportunity to introduce yourself to people that don’t know you or you do not have their email address.

When sending a direct message, you will find greater success in “soft-selling” your introduction as a way of letting know “you are out there”. Don’t be discouraged if you do not get an immediate answer – in some cases it may take weeks, even months, but doing this only takes 10-15 seconds and you start to establish your network faster.

Companies: Another way to expand your network is to search for contacts through the company search function. There are a few ways that you can tap this database – by company category; size of company by number of employees; and by geography. If your business and its success is contingent on the close proximity of your customers, searching by geography would be the most advantageous way to search new connections.

To search by geography, click on the “location” pull-down menu on the companies tab and put the zip code of your business. LinkedIn will search all of the connections you have in your network (1st, 2nd and 3rd degrees) that are located near that zip code and list the companies for those connections. You will then be able to click on the companies and see what other contacts may be advantageous for you to connect with.

People: To add more connections, visit the “contacts” tab from your homepage. You can then click on “network statistics” and scroll down to the center of the page and click on “Your Region”. Clicking on your selected region will identify all of the contacts in your network – from 1st to 2nd to 3rd degrees. Your focus here would be to convert as many of your 2nd and 3rd degree connections into direct connections to begin to establish a closer, direct relationship with them.

By using LinkedIn, you can create a broader network of working professionals to foster relationships with and begin to build up an impenetrable circle of contacts that are exclusively yours. Targeting prospective connections via groups and companies, in addition to your already established network, will begin to develop a referral system that creates both short and long-term bonds. This network can become a very profitable way to grow your business.

B2B Shopping Cart – What an E-Commerce Business Takes to Be Successful

Online shopping is giving e-commerce businesses more and more room to flourish. E-commerce businesses have now been improving and developing with astonishing pace. E-commerce is basically doing trade online; buying and selling items on World Wide Web rather than local stores and shopping malls. There are many different modes for selling online and every mode needs a different king of shopping cart.

Every business to business (B2B) online store needs a B2B shopping cart.  Use of the right product and the right type of shopping cart affect your business.

Before going on further with B2B shopping cart, let us discuss first what is meant by B2B? B2B, as written above, means business to business. E-commerce, as with real life trading, deals in different aspects of trading.

Some trade with consumers, some with other business, some trade from consumer to business and some trade from business to consumers. B2B, as stated earlier in this article is business to business trading.

The point in e-commerce is the issue of secure payments, valid transaction and transfer of money from shopper’s credit card (or bank account) to a website and to website to owners accounts. This wired connected worldwide trade – the e-commerce – just like real trade has different forms and types with different benefits and drawbacks.

All types are different ways of buying and selling services and products. Some types of e-commerce are Consumer to business, business to consumers, business to employee and consumer to consumer. All of these have different modes and limits of transactions and payments.

Business to business is relatively new in e-commerce and getting more popularity than previous types of e-commerce and having a good shopping cart software review is important. According to a rough estimate, there are almost 90% of transaction made on internet are made via B2B e-commerce type as it allows large amounts o secure and quick transactions among business partners to improve their business which in due course increases their profits.

This is the main reason it is more common in practice where there are online store and e-shops. Owners of online shops and e-stores prefer this practice of transaction over any other form of transaction as it is quick and more reliable.

Business to business software that is used in online stores and websites and blogs that allow people doing shopping and buying services online is called B2B shopping cart. This software is featured with many of the common tools as the standard shopping cart software has.

Among the advantages it has is cost-efficiency. You do not have to spend millions to have a shopping cart. B2B shopping carts unable you to have your store open 24/7 and to have customers from all round the globe. To be exact and precise, you’re having a store that can be visited from everywhere in the world wherever the World Wide Web (the internet) is accessible.

What’s The Difference Between CRM, DAM, ERP And MIS – And Why You Should Integrate Them With W2P

For maximum productivity in web-to-print (W2P) it’s necessary to integrate the online sales portal with other business management systems. In some cases these will already exist within the print service provider’s business, and in others they may be added subsequently, but either way, it’s valuable to understand how they function and what benefits integration with W2P would bring.

CRM:

Customer Relationship Management tools support the sales role by recording all customer contact whether it is sales or service related. From this information a CRM system can prompt follow-up calls or other contacts and generate promotional offers for both existing and prospective customers, backed by a record of previous purchase history and notes on any problems.

Feeding W2P activity information into a CRM system is an obvious move as it’s important that all customer interaction and purchasing activity should be visible within the print service provider’s organisation. This not only gives sales and management staff a more complete view of how much business a customer is doing with the printer, but also a sense of how they prefer to interact – do W2P sales follow sales visits, calls or email promotions, for example, or do they tend to occur independently of them?

This information can also provide pointers for the maintenance and development of the W2P portal itself. If initial W2P orders are followed by a reversion to phone, fax or email ordering, for example, this may mean that the portal is not sufficiently easy to use or doesn’t support the type of work that the customer wants to place.

DAM:

Digital Asset Management systems have been around for a while, pre-dating widespread broadband internet, and were often used to provide access to hi-res picture libraries for graphic designers, ad agencies and magazine or catalogue publishers, with on-line interfaces for image selection. Nowadays they may also store master layout documents, images and graphics that are frequently used by customers of template-based W2P.

A value-added service that can tie customers in to their printer, a DAM system can be integrated with a W2P portal to enable the correct templates, images and graphics to be accessed during online construction of template-based jobs. For speed of display, often low resolution RGB images are used to provide the customer preview; when the job is approved for print, these are replaced with high resolution print-ready CMYK versions, a task that can be automated with the correct integration between W2P portal and DAM.

Any W2P system that includes template-based job creation will by default have some degree of DAM functionality, which should be sufficient if you’re starting from scratch. If there’s an existing DAM system, integration with the W2P portal may be possible to save duplication, or it may be simpler to transfer the relevant files into the W2P system.

ERP and MIS:

Often used interchangeably, Enterprise Resource Planning and Management Information Systems largely overlap in planning and executing jobs more efficiently, managing quoting, job numbering, planning and scheduling, allocation and use of resources – both mechanical and human – and consumables and stock replenishment, finishing, shipping and invoicing. In addition to improving customer service through more accurate quoting and job tracking, ERP and MIS help printers gather business intelligence via analysis of customer data and can play a useful role in achieving compliance with quality and environmental standards.

MIS solutions, the type more familiar to most printers, provide analysis of costs based on ink usage, production time, media use and wastage. This analysis may extend to material, equipment and operator performance, in addition to stock management and generation of invoices and delivery notes. Some MIS vendors provide CRM functionality as a module, or web-to-MIS connectivity. Sales staff are also supported via mobile access to MIS, making it possible to quote and book jobs from the customer’s site.

While MIS offerings generally provide outputs that can be used with financial systems, ERP solutions differ in that they generally provide the financial tools as well, which may include CRM, human resources and payroll. ERP proponents point out that this all-in-one approach avoids the potential difficulties inherent in connecting disparate systems from multiple vendors and can avoid problems by alerting users to situations such as customers having exceeded their credit limits or payment terms before further jobs are accepted, for example.

Close integration of either MIS or ERP systems with W2P allows online customers to benefit from automated pricing, ordering, job scheduling and status visibility, while giving the printer reliable information about work in progress for production control, profitability analysis and cashflow planning.

What Is MySAP?

Strictly speaking, MySap is an amalgamated application that helps bring the elements to its relevant handler or operator. MySAP is regarded as a revolution in its own sense, and has come extensively handy with all that heightened plus boosted business, trade and commerce taking place around sharply. MySap increases the effectiveness and efficiency of SAP Netweaver by making its use in more comprehensive manner. The operator also browses through the web gateway of mySAP generally referred as the work place. By retrieving this website the operator could straightforwardly use SAP applications with much more ease. The address of this portal is mySAP.com. The access to this portal could be subject of diverse fees structures and austere authorization. This has made the use of SAP application even more tranquil and laid-back.

It is yet another release of SAP AG, and sub-product of SAP. Just a reminder, that SAP AG is a German firm. The aspect of mySAP business suite has also been classified as ground-breaking. In other words, MySAP has taken the world by storm. If you consider this to be hyperbole, you are highly erroneous because the records speak for it. According to experts, mySAP is increasingly taken to use by various companies, firms and businesses etc. to help surge the resourceful and proficient running of the usual functions and errands in relation to the business. Companies that have opted for mySAP have come on their own to assert in it its merits and have claimed a commendable rise in productivity of the company, consequently leading to the expansion in revenues and profits. Such is the magic of mySAP!

Almost all the applications of mySAP, especially those of its business suite make use of the SAP Netweaver. And as far as the running of diverse applications is concerned SAP web AS is what it makes use of. Not to be unmentioned, that mySAP has its CRM interface altered to that type which could be compatible enough to make use of SAP EP effectively. This was recently done by SAP to increase its adaptability and functioning. And as per the experts, this have worked commendably well in the favor of the producers. The core errands of mySAP ERP typically include the likes of making buying invoices, verifying the manifold planning procedures and several other doings. It is said to be quite effective in all the general task in association with the customer relation management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). It is quite astonishing that there near about already configured functionality prototypes that help the operator to reach them when the relevant work is looked for. All in all this comes overly convenient in the functioning of the business.

The fundamental functions of mySAP are revolved around increasing the manageability, amenability and adeptness of the business. This shall consequently leads to the increased chances of manifold and multifarious applications and software that companies make use of to be amalgamated to upsurge their usability and hence reduce the running costs in regard to the different software.

How to Reduce Wastage of Office Stationery and Supplies – Some Useful Tips and Tricks!

“A penny saved is a penny earned.” – Benjamin Franklin (One of the Founding Fathers of the United States)

One of the primary concerns of most businesses and organisations is being cost effective and ensuring that the company funds are put to good use. The right way to achieve this is not by reducing procurement but by reducing wastage and misuse of office supplies and stationery, which can actually punch a big hole into the company funds and increase overhead costs in the long run.

The two main areas of office supplies that are generally more prone to get wasted are Stationery and Paper Products. However, the good news is that all one needs is just a little bit of caution and care to curb this wastage. That’s why; starting today, let’s make conservation a habit not just for environmental causes but even in the office as well.

Keep a Check on Office Stationery to Reduce Wastage!

Without anyone to manage and keep an eye on office stationery, their consumption can often go out of hand. Appointing an in-charge for managing office supplies and stationery is a good idea to ensure that they are not being misused.

a) This way it will also help you understand which office supplies are most in-demand and which lie at the bottom as redundant resources, to help you order appropriately the next time.

b) Instead of simply handing over office stationery every time an employee asks for it, keep a track in an office stationery register. With this step, once the numbers are in front of them, employees will automatically get conscious of borrowing office stationery like pens or notepads too often and will try to use them judiciously.

c) As a more frantic measure, you can also assign specific office stationery and their respective quantities for each employee per month based on his or her role. So if everyone knows that they can get only three pens or one marker in a month, they will take care to not lose it.

Reuse and Recycle Paper and Paper Products!

Another highly misused and wasted office supplies are paper. According to the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. Surely, most of us can make do with a little less! While paper is recyclable, don’t you think it’s a better idea to cut down on its wastage at the primary level as even for recycling, the paper needs to be collected, transported and processed, which, in-turn is an additional expense.

a) The first thing to do here is to educate and create awareness amongst employees. You can start a ‘Save Paper – Save Trees’ campaign at your work place, rewarding employees who strictly follow this practice.

b) Use one-sided paper that’s no longer needed to make notes and rough drafts instead of using fresh paper, post-its and notepads every time.

c) You can also use paper once shredded as packaging supplies to protect fragile items while shipping.

d) Save printer paper by encouraging employees to print on both sides whenever possible.

e) Likewise, you can re-use envelopes, packaging supplies and cardboard boxes that your company has received.

Even small measures taken at the right time can lead to big changes. We hope following these simple yet effective tips will help reduce wastage of office supplies in the long run at your workplace!

An Insight on Basic Off-Page Optimization Tactics

Digital marketing is all about making the client website or other web resources search-engine friendly. It is all about enhancing the ranking of client websites or other web resources in the various search engine results pages. If a website has enhanced ranking in a search engine result page, it implies that it attracts more and more web traffic. If the website is meant for commercial purposes, enhanced web traffic in it contributes to lead generation and sales. Thereby, through proper digital marketing of a web portal, one can ensure business profitability. Digital marketing is incomplete without search engine optimization or SEO. In this context, it is relevant to add that SEO is of two types and they are on-page and off-page. This blog is an honest attempt to discuss the various off-page optimization tactics that the web marketer must do to enhance the visibility of client websites.

Off-Page Optimization

As the name suggests, Off-page optimization has everything to do with optimizing a web resource like website, externally and this means that not focussing on internal work associated with the website. The seasoned web marketer can do such type of optimization by means of link-building. The concept of link-building is to pass the website link using blogs, articles, press releases, and other content posted on other websites. Then, optimizing the posts in a manner so that the contents along with the website link attracts more and more audience. This is important because of the enhanced chances of lead-generation and lead-conversions to sales.

Link-Building Strategies

Following is a list of link-building strategies that web-marketers usually follow:-

Write Blogs

Digital marketing professionals can write blogs relevant to the business, themselves, or with the help of professional content writers and post them in more than one blog posting website. When they do so they also pass the link to the client website. In this manner, the client website gains visibility in the various search engine results pages.

Write Articles

Web marketing professionals can write articles relevant to the business and post them in various articles posting websites. Common article posting websites include EzineArticles, article base. The SEO professionals also pass the link to the client’s website along with the posts. This increases the visibility of the client web portal.

Do Blog Commenting

If you are pondering on increasing the visibility of your website then you can visit relevant websites online, check relevant blog posts, and do blog commenting. While passing blog comments make sure that you pass the links of your client web portal.

Post Forums

There are a number of forum posting websites available online. As a seasoned digital marketer you can register with some of the forum posting sites and post forum contents along with the link to the client website. In this manner, you can attempt to increase the visibility of your client website.

Questions and Answers

There are a number of questions and answers sites and you can post questions, answers on relevant topics, pass the link to your client website along with the answers.

Social Bookmarking

There is a popular social bookmarking website available online. These include Twitter, Stumble Upon, Dribble, Reddit, Digg, and many more. As a digital marketing professional, you can post on social bookmarking sites and do search engine optimization activities.

Post in Social Media Websites

There are a number of social media websites online and they include Facebook, LinkedIn, to name a few. You can post content on these websites. While posting contents you can pass the link to your client website. This enhances the visibility of your client’s website.

This blog focuses on few Off-page SEO practices. Apart from those discussed above, there is available a wide variety of other Off-page optimization strategies that the seasoned digital marketer uses to enhance the visibility of the client website or web-resources.

Quick Guide to Implementing Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing & BPM

Definitions and Overview

Business Performance Management (BPM) establishes a framework to improve business performance by measuring key business characteristics which can be used to feedback into the decision process and guide operations in an attempt to improve strategic organisational performance. Other popular terms for this include; Enterprise PM (EPM), Corporate PM (CPM) Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Management Information Systems (MIS).

BPM: Cycle of setting objectives, monitoring performance and feeding back to new objectives.

Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as the set of tools which allows end-users easy access to relevant information and the facility to analyse this to aid decision making. More widely the ‘intelligence’ is the insight which is derived from this analysis (eg. trends and correlations).

BI: Tools to Access & Analyse Data

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are strategically aligned corporate measures that are used to monitor, predict and anticipate the performance of the organisation. They form the basis of any the BPM solution and in an ideal world it should be possible to relate strategic KPIs to actual operational performance within the BI application.

KPIs provide a quick indication on the health of the organisation and guide management to the operational areas affecting performance.

In many companies analysis of data is complicated by the fact that data is fragmented within the business. This causes problems of duplication, inconsistent definitions, inconsistency, inaccuracy and wasted effort.

Silos of Data: Fragmented, Departmental Data Stores, often aligned with specific business areas.

Data Warehousing (DWH) is often the first step towards BI. A Data Warehouse is a centralised pool of data structured to facilitate access and analysis.

DWH: Centralised/Consolidated Data Store

The DWH will be populated from various sources (heterogeneous) using an ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) or data integration tool. This update may be done in regular periodic batches, as a one off load or even synchronised with the source data (real time).

ETL: The process of extracting data from a source system, transforming (or validating) it and loading it into a structured database.

A reporting (or BI) layer can then be used to analyse the consolidated data and create dashboards and user defined reports. A modelling layer can be used to integrate budgets and forecasting.

As these solutions get more complex, the definitions of the systems and what they are doing becomes more important. This is known as metadata and represents the data defining the actual data and its manipulation. Each part of the system has its own metadata defining what it is doing. Good management & use of metadata reduces development time, makes ongoing maintenance simpler and provides users with information about the source of the data, increasing their trust and understanding of it.

Metadata: Data about data, describing how and where it is being used, where it came from and what changes have been made to it.

Commercial Justifications

There is clear commercial justification to improve the quality of information used for decision making. A survey conducted by IDC found that the mean payback of BI implementation was 1.6 years and that 54% of businesses had a 5 year ROI of >101% and 20% had ROI > 1000%.

ROI on BI > 1000% from 20% of organisations

There are now also regulatory requirements to be considered. Sarbanes-Oxley requires that US listed companies disclose and monitor key risks and relevant performance indicators – both financial and non financial in their annual reports. A robust reporting infrastructure is essential for achieving this.

SarbOx requires disclosure of financial & non-financial KPIs

Poor data quality is a common barrier to accurate reporting and informed decision making. A good data quality strategy, encompassing non system issues such as user training and procedures can have a large impact. Consolidating data into a DWH can help ensure consistency and correct poor data, but it also provides an accurate measure of data quality allowing it to be managed more pro-actively.

Data Quality is vital and a formal data quality strategy is essential to continually manage and improve it.

Recent research (PMP Research) asked a broad cross section of organisations their opinion of their data quality before and after a DWH implementation.

– “Don’t know” responses decreased from 17% to 7%

– “Bad” or “Very Bad” decreased from 40% to 9%

– Satisfactory (or better) increased from 43% to 84%

DWH implementations improve Data Quality.

Tools Market Overview

At present BI is seen as a significant IT growth area and as such everyone is trying to get onto the BI bandwagon:

ERP tools have BI solutions e.g SAP BW, Oracle Apps

CRM tools are doing it: Siebel Analytics,

ETL vendors are adding BI capabilities: Informatica

BI vendors are adding ETL tools: Business Objects (BO) Data Integrator (DI), Cognos Decision Stream

Database vendors are extending their BI & ETL tools:

Oracle: Oracle Warehouse Builder, EPM

Microsoft: SQL 2005, Integration Services, Reporting Services, Analytical Services

Improved Tools

Like all maturing markets, consolidation has taken place whereby fewer suppliers now cover more functionality. This is good for customers as more standardisation, better use of metadata and improved functionality is now easily available. BI tools today can now satisfy the most demanding customer’s requirements for information.

Thinking and tools have moved on – we can now build rapid, business focussed solutions in small chunks – allowing business to see data, store knowledge, learn capabilities of new tools and refine their requirements during the project! Gone are the days of the massive data warehousing project, which was obsolete before it was completed.

A typical DWH project should provide usable results within 3 – 6 Months.

Advice & Best Practice

Initial Phase

Successful BI projects will never finish. It should perpetually evolve to meet the changing needs of the business. So first ‘wins’ need to come quickly and tools and techniques need to be flexible, quick to develop and quick to deploy.

Experience is Essential

Often we have been brought in to correct failed projects and it is frightening how many basic mistakes are made through inexperience. A data warehouse is fundamentally different to your operational systems and getting the initial design and infrastructure correct is crucial to satisfying business demands.

Keep Internal Control

We believe that BI is too close to the business and changes too fast to outsource. Expertise is required in the initial stages, to ensure that a solid infrastructure is in place (and use of the best tools and methods.) If sufficient experience is not available internally external resource can be useful in the initial stages but this MUST include skills transfer to internal resources. The DWH can then grow and evolve (with internal resourcing) to meet the changing needs of the business.

Ensure Management and User Buy In

It may sound obvious but internal knowledge and support is essential for the success of a DWH, yet ‘Reporting’ is often given a low priority and can easily be neglected unless it is supported at a senior business level. It is common to find that there is a limited knowledge of user requirements. It is also true that requirements will change over time both in response to changing business needs and to the findings/outcomes of the DWH implementation and use of new tools.

Strong Project Management

The complex and iterative nature of a data warehouse project requires strong project management. The relatively un-quantifiable risk around data quality needs managing along with changing user requirements. Plan for change and allow extra budget for the unexpected. Using rapid application development techniques (RAD) mitigates some of the risks by exposing them early in the project with the use of proto-types.

Educating the End Users

Do not under estimate the importance of training when implementing a new BI/ DWH solution. Trained users are 60% more successful in realising the benefits of BI than untrained users. But this training needs to consider specific data analysis techniques as well as how to use the BI tools. In the words of Gartner, “it is more critical to train users on how to analyse the data.” Gartner goes on to say “… that focusing only on BI tool training can triple the workload of the IT help desk and result in user disillusionment. A user who is trained on the BI tool but does not know how to use it in the context of his or her BI/DWH environment will not be able to get the analytical results he or she needs…”. Hence bespoke user training on your BI system and data is essential.

Careful planning of the training needs and making the best use of the different training mediums now available can overcome this issue. Look for training options such as: Structured classroom (on or off site), web based e-learning (CBT), on the job training & skills transfer, bespoke training around your solution & data.

Technical Overview

Information Portal: This allows users to manage & access reports and other information via a corporate web portal. As users create & demand more reports the ability to easily find, manage & distribute them is becoming more important.

Collaboration: The ability for the Information Portal to support communication between relevant people centred around the information in the portal. This could be discussion threads attached to reports or workflow around strategic goal performance.

Guided Analysis: The system guides users where to look next during data analysis. Taking knowledge from people’s heads and placing it in the BI system.

Security: Access to system functionality and data (both rows and columns) can be controlled down to user level and based on your network logon.

Dashboards & Scorecards:

Providing management with a high level, graphical view of their business performance (KPIs) with easy drill down to the underlying operational detail.

Ad-hoc Reporting and Data Analysis: End users can easily extract data, analyse it (slice, dice & drill) and formally present it in reports & distribute them.

Formatted/ Standard Reports: Pre-defined, pixel perfect, often complex reports created by IT. The power of end user reporting tools and data warehousing is now making this type of report writing less technical and more business focussed.

Tight MS Office integration: More users depend on MS Office software, therefore the BI tool needs to seamlessly link into these tools.

Write Back: The BI portal should provide access to write back to the database to maintain: reference data, targets, forecasts, workflow.

Business Modelling/ Alerting: around centrally maintained data with pre-defined, end user maintained, business rules.

Real Time: As the source data changes it is instantly passed through to the user. Often via message queues.

Near Real Time: Source data changes are batched up and sent through on a short time period, say every few minutes – this requires special ETL techniques.

Batch Processing: Source Data is captured in bulk, say overnight, whilst the BI system is offline.

Relational Database Vs OLAP (cubes, slice & dice, pivot)

This is a complex argument, but put simply most things performed in an OLAP cube can be achieved in the relational world but may be slower both to execute and develop. As a rule of thumb, if you already work in a relational database environment, OLAP should only be necessary where analysis performance is an issue or you require specialist functionality, such as budgeting, forecasting or ‘what if’ modelling. The leading BI tools seamlessly provide access to data in either relational or OLAP form, making this primarily a technology decision rather than a business one.

Top Down or Bottom Up Approach?

The top down approach focuses on strategic goals and the business processes and organisational structure to support them. This may produce the ideal company processes but existing systems are unlikely to support them or provide the data necessary to measure them. This can lead to a strategy that is never adopted because there is no physical delivery and strategic goals cannot be measured.

The bottom up approach takes the existing systems and data and presents it to the business for them to measure & analyse. This may not produce the best strategic information due to the limited data available and data quality.

We recommend a compromise of both approaches: Build the pragmatic bottom up solution as a means to get accurate measures of the business and a better understanding of current processes, whilst performing a top down analysis to understand what the business needs strategically. The gap analysis of what can be achieved today and what is desired strategically will then provide the future direction for the solution and if the solution has been designed with change in mind, this should be relatively straight forward, building upon the system foundations already in place.

Advanced Business Intelligence

The following describes some advanced BI requirements that some organisations may want to consider: Delivering an integrated BPM solution which has business rules and workflow built in allowing the system to quickly guide the decision maker to the relevant information.

Collaboration and Guided Analysis to help manage the action required as a result of the information obtained.

More user friendly Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, where the system finds correlations between un-related data sets in order to find the ‘golden nugget’ of information.

More integration of BI information into the Front Office Systems e.g. a gold rated customer gets VIP treatment when they call in, data profiling to suggest this customer may churn, hence offer them an incentive to stay.

Increased usage of Real Time data.

End to end Data Lineage automatically captured by the tools. Better metadata management of the systems will mean that users can easily see where the data came from and what transformations it has undergone, improving the trust in the data & reports. Systems will also be self documenting providing users with more help information and simplifying ongoing maintenance.

Integrated, real time Data Quality Management as a means to measure accuracy of operational process performance. This would provide cross system validation, and verify business process performance by monitoring data accuracy, leading to better and more dynamic process modelling, business process re-engineering and hence efficiency gains.

Packaged Analytical Applications like finance systems in the 80’s and packaged ERP (Enterprise Requirement Planning) in the 90’s. Packaged BI may become the standard for this decade. Why build your own data warehouse and suite of reports and dashboards from scratch when your business is similar to many others? Buy packaged elements and use rapid deployment templates and tools to configure them to meet your precise needs. This rapid deployment capability then supports you as your business evolves.



BI for the masses: As information becomes more critical to manage operational efficiencies, more people need access to that information. Now the BI tools can technically and cost effectively provide more people with access to information, BI for the masses is now reality and can provide significant improvement to a business. The increased presence of Microsoft in the BI space will also increase usage of BI and make it more attractive. BusinessObjects’ acquisition of Crystal and recent release of XI will also extend BI to more people, in and outside the organisation – now everyone can be given secure access to information!

Conclusion

The potential benefits from a BI/DWH implementation are huge but far too many companies fail to realise these through: lack of experience, poor design, poor selection and use of tools, poor management of data quality, poor or no project management, limited understanding of the importance of metadata, no realisation that if it is successful it will inevitably evolve and grow, limited awareness of the importance of training….. with all these areas to consider using a specialist consultancy such as IT Performs makes considerable sense.

Microsoft Dynamics ERP Selection: GP, AX, NAV, SL, CRM – Notes for Consultant

Microsoft recently (in September 2005) renamed its ERP product: Great Plains – Microsoft Dynamics GP, Navision – Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Axapta – Microsoft Dynamics AX, Solomon – Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft CRM – Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The idea is probably nice – to unify future concordance product under Microsoft Dynamics name. There are multiple possibilities, however in getting all MRP systems merged into one Microsoft Dynamics and what should be taken as base and what should be phased out. We can not be judges – we will give you some facts for you to take into consideration. This article is planned as a first entry point to look “under the hood” of Microsoft ERP applications and probably compare the facts with the competition: SAP (especially SAP Business One if you are small or mid-size company or international branch of multinational corporation), Oracle E-Business Suite/Oracle Financials, also referred as Oracle Applications.

o Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0/Microsoft Great Plains. This ERP was initially architectured by Great Plains Software – Great Plains Dynamics and Great eEnterprise hit the market in earlier and middle 1990th. If you remember those old-good-days of IT boom – nobody knew which operating system will win: Unix/Solaris, Microsoft Windows, Apple MAC OS. This is why – the traditional (and pioneering way) for those days was to create a shell, written in C language to abstract you from Graphical platform. Great Plains Dexterity was this shell, programming language (sanscript). The second fundamental idea was to abstract Great Plains Dynamics from database platform, however the abstraction was done on the level of “budget” database platforms: Ctree/Faircomm, and Btrive, later on Pervasive SQL 2000, for Microsoft SQL Server 6.5/7.0/2000 Great Plains used atomic stored procs approach to speed up database access. Nowadays Microsoft Dynamics GP/Great Plains versions 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 7.5 are available for Ctree and Pervasive, however since version 8.0 Microsoft Great Plains is available on MS SQL Server/MSDE platform only. Currently Microsoft Great Plains 9.0 is offered in USA, Latin America, Canada (including French Canadian version for Quebec), UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries where official language is English – such as South East Asia, for instance.

o Microsoft Navision/Navision Attain/Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Some ERP analytics believe that Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions (later renamed into Microsoft Business Solutions) bought Navision Software (est. in 1984). The fundamental ideas of Navision come to its own shell – C/SIDE, database proprietary platform: C/SIDE, etc. Navision was designed to be flexible and grow with your business – from small to upper mid-market. Navision Software had its own marketing plans prior to be purchased by Microsoft and expanded in continental Europe, UK, USA (competing with Great Plains Software and Solomon Software). When Navision was bought by Microsoft – Microsoft Business Solutions offered and promoted Navision in East Europe: Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, etc. Plus it tried Navision in Brazil (over 100 implementations – 2005). Navision is more flexible to localization challenge (than Microsoft Great Plains)

o Microsoft Axapta/Microsoft Dynamics AX – it seems to be rising star for Microsoft and it can compete with upper ERP/MRP mid-market. Axapta has modern design and its ability to expand is still in its architecture modern model (versus Great Plains or Navision – where we see integrations with MS Office, Web Fronts/Business Portal/eConnect/eCommerce type of improvements). In late 2005 we see US and UK MBS VAR activity to sign for Axapta and consultants training.

o Microsoft Dynamics SL/Microsoft Solomon – this ERP is for project-driven organizations.

o Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0/Microsoft CRM 3.0. This CRM solution from Microsoft is abreast of the majority of Microsoft recent ideas and innovations: Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, XML Web Services driven MS CRM SDK with C# and VB.Net sample code. Currently MS CRM 1.2 and 3.0 has integration to Microsoft Dynamics GP 7.5, 8.0 (with service patch) and 9.0 (coming…)

Please do not hesitate to call or email us: USA 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 help@albaspectrum.com

Selecting the Best Joomla Development Company

Joomla is a popular and advanced Open Source content management system available online. It is used around the globe with a number of objectives. From simple websites to comprehensive corporate apps, Joomla does everything for you. Joomla is scalable, reliable and straightforward to manage. Once the installation is done, the administrator of the site can login to the entire backend administration console and get started with setting up categories, sections, polls and content items. An expert Joomla Development Company can help your business in getting an expert website design template that not just attract the visitors but can even offer a complimentary edge to your company’s brand image.

In order to properly handle the versatile Joomla Tools, the expert Joomla developers need to be adapted so that they can deliver the desired solutions to the customers and that too in pretty quick time. The Joomla module development precisely pertains to a smaller code unit within the CMS. These kinds of modules can easily interact with the database and can carry out strong functionalities.

The Joomla module development has the following aspects:

• Extended access

• Reviews and Comments

• Newsletter with unsubscribe and subscribe

• Calendar of Events

• Support

• E-Commerce

• Job Portal

• Catalogue

• Business Directory

• Chat Room and Photo Gallery

• Project Management

• Forum and News

• Guest book

Some of the different purposes that this system will serve are:

• Personal Websites and Corporate Websites

• Government Applications

• Jobs Portals

• Sites for Small Business

• Sites for School and Colleges

• Community Portals

• News Sites

• Online Commerce

• Video Manager Website

A suitable company in this industry will offer you the best services in regard to Joomla development system. Developing standard and corporate websites is quite simple for them and they can really help you in critically managing your business.

Why choose the best Joomla Development Company?

• The experience of the company can really help you in generating some fine results for your business. Experience really matters a lot in the IT sector.

• They have a rich resource pool of the developers with several skill sets.

• They make use of their project management technology and thereby helping you to maximize your business goals.

• Conductive environment for working is created.

• Timely delivery of projects

• Very strong mechanism

So, this was all about selecting the best Joomla Development Company. You got to ensure that your business gets benefited from the apt services offered by the firm. With proper services and skills, your business can certainly grow a great deal. These are some of the most important things which you should remember in regard to choosing the finest Joomla Development Company. For any other information on this topic, you can easily seek some professional guidance from the expert. Go ahead, and grab the opportunity to take your business to a new level.

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