Have you got the ROI on Oracle BI?
Few weeks back, I witnessed a great debate on significance of measuring ROI on BI projects. There were opposing views being expressed where some argued that measuring ROI may not be possible for every BI project, while others said that establishing ROI is both possible and essential to measure the success of the project. According to me, in majority of cases, it is possible to measure and realize the ROI on the BI projects over a period of time. The ROI could come in different ways viz. through greater agility to respond to market demands resulting in greater revenue or by increasing operational efficiencies or by prevention of future loss through compliance related BI projects and so on.
As organizations today undergo business transformation, I believe there is a tremendous potential to increase the ROI of these transformations by implementing BI to maximize the operational efficiencies. For very large organizations with multiple lines of business, this may not happen in a big-bang way and usually is a multi-phased approach. One of our client organizations is a very large retailer in US, and is currently on a similar journey. Traditionally, it has been focused on developing in-house custom IT solutions for their business needs. As a result of this, over the years some of the lines of businesses were still using legacy applications, which posed limitations to increasing operational efficiencies.
One of their business units was facing a similar problem. They were losing millions of dollars worth of claim settlement payments from their partners, because of their inability to access accurate and timely business intelligence. At this juncture, we engaged with them to define a BI roadmap to overcome these challenges. Working closely with their senior management, we defined a deck of Financial and Operational Effectiveness dashboards to be delivered on the Oracle Business Intelligence EE 10g platform.
These dashboards gave them ability to monitor KPIs related to claims, aging of claims, write-offs and payments anytime. Now they had the ability to get the bird's eye view of the health of their business operations. They could now easily identify the partners with whom they were facing payment issues. They could now easily drill down to the detailed order transaction data to understand the root causes of claim denials on specific orders. This new found insight helped them to identify the current business process gaps. This triggered a change to their core business processes to address those gaps.
This is what I call 'Closed Loop BI' in action. I still remember the delight on the face of the Operations Head when she started using the BI dashboards. Oracle BI is now helping them save millions of dollars of write-offs every year. This success has triggered other business units in the client organization to leverage the power of Oracle BI. And who said that it is difficult to have a ROI on BI.......
I am sure many of you have similar experiences to share.
