Forecasting and Budgeting made simple with OBIEE

Want to see into the future? Forecasting and budgeting made simple with OBIEE

Importance of forecasting and budgeting to business success:
Forecasting is crucial to business success as it analyses information about your business, the economy, the market place and current trends to prepare for your business’ future.  The forecasting process in turn is interlinked with budgeting plans as it provides high quality, accurate information allowing for goal setting and strategic management.

A budget is the success plan for a business. As the proverb goes, ‘Those who fail to plan, plan to fail’. Budgeting helps an organisation to reach goals within your organisation, making sure you are earning sufficient income and are in control of the costs related to that income.

Financial forecasting is important for several reasons:

• Helps the company in preventing losses by making the proper decisions based on relevant information.
• Enables management to change operations at the right time in order to reap the greatest benefit.

Organisations that can create high quality forecasts are able to identify trends, scenarios and change management which is critical in meeting business performance targets. Accurate forecasting enables budgeting planning; as well as decision making in terms of market segmentation, the probable success of a new product line / enhancements; and the route to market; while ensuring time and money are not poorly allocated in failed product launches.

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition delivers the widest and most robust set of reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboard, and scorecard functionality, providing a rich end user experience that includes visualisation, alerts and notifications.

Features of OBIEE aiding forecasting and budgeting:
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is a wide-ranging BI platform that provides the best base for building enterprise BI solutions. It includes a full range of easy-to-use and intuitive end-user tools facilitating forecasting and budgeting, such as:

• Reports on data from multi-data source (such as Oracle, MySQL, MS Access, SyBase, ODBC Sources and can connect with many other sources), therefore, faster collection and analysis of data through the use of real time ad hoc queries and analysis (Oracle BI Answers); helps an organisation to gain efficient insight; amplifying change reaction times.
• Scorecard and strategy management – Alignment around a consistent set of key performance indicators (KPI’s).
• Enterprise and financial reporting
• Online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis and presentation (Hyperion Web Analysis)
• High-volume production reporting (Hyperion Interactive Reporting and Hyperion SQR Production Reporting) provide efficient and simplified graphical presentation of data: giving an organisation greater market knowledge allowing for forecasting and competitive advantage.
• OBIEE has a ‘write back’ feature that allows end users to update or insert data back into the database. Employers can use OBIEE as a reporting tool as well as for entering sales quotas or budgets. This feature aids periodic forecasting as annual budgets become outdated each quarter especially with the continuous changing environments.

Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition reduces the skills required for report production, enabling more time to analyse the results. This results in more accurate information, better forecasting, budgeting and decision making which in turn aids business success.

If you need more information on our Oracle Business Intelligence Solutions or would like to arrange a consultation, please feel free to email info@codec.ie or call us on 01 603 4300.