Next Generation of Predictive Intelligence Analytic Application

Across major industries, predictive intelligence analytics is being used in a surprisingly broad range of applications. Insurance companies use such analytics to perform reverse calculations to determine how much cash to hold to cover catastrophic claims. Retailers forecast demand down to the store and item levels. Manufacturers use it in product design and to forecast production. Pharmaceutical companies use it to analyze clinical trial data to plan for patent filings and determine future investments.

The unfortunate reality, however, is that most managers are still using a variety of spreadsheets – and with them, multiple versions of the truth to plan and forecast their business. This explains the growing sense of fear associated with desktop spreadsheets, especially among business executives who rely on information generated in these spreadsheets to make critically important decisions and then wait in dreaded anticipation of the oft heard phrase, “We had an error in the spreadsheet.”

eiVia helps enterprises move analytics from desktop spreadsheets to the Internet and links cause-and-effect information with predictive analysis. eiVia provides analytic applications solutions to answer a business manager’s most difficult questions: Why? What if? And what’s best?

Common Problems with Spreadsheets

• Analyzing data on different dimensions or filters not equal to the task.
• Excel inefficiencies.
• Reconciling and rolling up spreadsheets a challenge.
• Analyzing huge amounts of data, examining more variables, uncovering previously hidden relationships.
• Delivering startlingly accurate predictions.
• Change and version control capabilities unacceptable to most systems.

What would a Second Generation (Enterprise) Spreadsheet look like?

• It would exist in the “cloud” to facilitate data consolidation and collaboration.
• It would be an extension of the data warehouse to enforce data governance.
• It would be simple, flexible and self-service.

Excel Hell No More

Now is the time to challenge conventional belief. Enterprises should consider replacing desktop spreadsheets when:

• The underlying data used in the analysis is managed in a large database.
• It is essential to validate business rules used in analysis and reporting.
• Decision-making requires information sharing, consolidation, and collaboration among users.
• Success is dependent upon aligning financial goals across business units.
• Management wants a better understanding of cost and performance drivers and a more forward-looking view of the business.
• Financial processes consume less time and fewer resources, and provide more flexibility for making changes.

But the reality is that more and more applications are driven from enterprise databases, especially data warehouses.

Data warehousing practitioners have long stressed the importance of managing enterprise data assets, pointing out that data warehouses ensure data security, accuracy, consistency and transparency. Of course, these data assets have value only when they leave the protected confines of the data warehouse to be used in decision-making applications.

eiVia leverages the existing data warehouse architecture and extends current reporting capabilities by collecting and adding Event Intelligence to the data warehouse and maintaining the integrity, security, accuracy, consistency and transparency, all while supporting user-directed analysis. This facilitates an event-centric approach to reporting that answers the "Why?" question.