Frends BI enables Data-driven leadership

Ensure that the business facts support the decisions you make. To make decisions and react to anomalies, you need accurate and live business intelligence. Live BI must rely on clean and accurate data that is well structured. It can be live BI data only if collected from your systems and updated rapidly in your structured data storage. So whether your BI tools include Microsoft PowerBI, Qlikview or Cognos - the data means everything to successful data-driven leadership.

What does Frends data-driven Business Intelligence do?

Frends's unique integration platform-centric approach for data gathering connects to required systems via its integration capabilities. It gathers the BI data to ready-made data-structure in cloud data storage. During the data collecting, Frends ensures that each data element is qualified and meet the requirements. The data storage can then be used as a modern BI-reporting platform that provides precisely the KPIs you want to measure.

BI Data Quality is crucial

With the integration centric approach to BI, data quality aspects are handled incrementally and automatically by the automation processes.

In a traditional Master Data –project a huge amount of time and money is spent cleaning and scrubbing the existing data in systems and data sources, whilst Frends BI implements these functionalities incrementally constantly.

Frends constantly ensures that the BI data is clean by interacting with the people updating data. This way, personnel responsible for keeping the data up to date and in good quality can be engaged automatically to interact with the BI data.

As the integration skips inaccurate data automatically and asks users to provide the needed values keeping data accurate also becomes much more manageable.

Frends connects data in systems

The integration centric approach works with your systems and data, not against them. This means that each system is its own master of its own data instead of the data being forcibly synchronized to a predetermined format.

This allows the systems to have new features, updates, and even changes in their data structures without breaking the data's links and thus the reporting.

Take this example:

In the example above we want to connect both our sales and delivery together in Hubspot and JIRA. Rather than forcibly download data from both and try to make the data fit, we use the Data Quality mechanisms to create a link between the native datamodels of both JIRA and Hubspot, both of which have Accounts that have a website domain property.

The domain property is unique and can be validated easily as well as being understandable for everyone rather than some internal identification codes or mapping tables typically used in master data solutions.

This is enabled with Frends Integration Platform.

Frends - automating manual work

Often BI and reporting solutions rely on some level of manual work to move data between systems or to input data manually to an excel file or similar. The Frends BI approach eliminates all need for manual transferral of data between data sources through the integration-centric approach. Any manual input fields are directly queried from the relevant business owners through the Data Quality aspect of Frends BI.

Additionally, generating modern reports on a scheduled basis or distributing the reports via email or other mediums can be easily achieved. Previously all sales personnel received monthly reports of their customer's performance in emails manually sent one-by-one by the financial controller. This was trivial to automate fully:

This saves over 4 hours of manual work every month, and the automation took less than 30 minutes to develop and deploy.

Modern BI reporting

Once everything has been fully automated, and data quality controls have been established, connecting the data to a BI display tool allows for the modern BI tools to unleash their full potential:

• All reports are interactive and can be drilled down
• All data is real-time or at most a couple of hours old
• Data access levels are easily controlled
• Further development of the display layer is easy without expert help

(sample BI report with false data)

Frends data-driven BI approach

Instead of a costly Master Data project usually involving a master data platform and supplier, the Frends's data-driven Business Intelligence – Approach leverages iPaaS and process automation capabilities to integrate and synchronize the data within systems. It is done so that each system is its own Master data source, and the Frends BI –solution simply links the data together.

The apparent benefits of data-driven BI approach are:

1. Drastically more cost-efficient compared to a master data solution.
2. Implements data quality and data scrubbing automatically.
3. Involves and engages relevant personnel through Teams or Slack.
4. Automates any manual steps involved in reporting or accounting.
5. Is extendible and modular, so you can only choose to use what you need.