A Case On Payroll Management

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

INTRODUCTION

Business intelligence (BI) is the ability of an organization to collect, maintains, and organizes data. This produces large amounts of information that can help develop new opportunities. Identifying these opportunities, and implementing an effective strategy, can provide a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.The goal of modern business intelligence deployments is to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is sometimes a synonym for competitive intelligence (because they both support decision making), BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. If understood broadly, business intelligence can include the subset of competitive intelligence.

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence. He defined intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."Business intelligence as it is understood today is said to have evolved from the decision support systems that began in the 1960s and developed throughout the mid-1980s. DSS originated in the computer-aided models created to assist with decision making and planning. From DSS, data warehouses, Executive Information Systems, OLAP and business intelligence came into focus beginning in the late 80s.In 1989, Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed "business intelligence" as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems. It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND DATA WAREHOUSING

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.To distinguish between the concepts of business intelligence and data warehouses, Forrester Research often defines business intelligence in one of two ways:

Using a broad definition: "Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making." When using this definition, business intelligence also includes technologies such as data integration, data quality, data warehousing, master data management, text and content analytics, and many others that the market sometimes lumps into the Information Management segment. Therefore, Forrester refers to data preparation and data usage as two separate, but closely linked segments of the business intelligence architectural stack.Forrester defines the latter, narrower business intelligence market as, "...referring to just the top layers of the BI architectural stack such as reporting, analytics and dashboards."

BI APPLICATIONS IN AN ENTERPRISE

Business intelligence can be applied to the following business purposes, in order to drive business value.

Measurement – program that creates a hierarchy of performance metrics (see also Metrics Reference Model) and benchmarking that informs business leaders about progress towards business goals (business process management).

Analytics – program that builds quantitative processes for a business to arrive at optimal decisions and to perform business knowledge discovery. Frequently involves: data mining, process mining, statistical analysis, predictive analytics, predictive modeling, business process modeling, and complex event processing and prescriptive analytics.

Reporting/enterprise reporting – program that builds infrastructure for strategic reporting to serve the strategic management of a business, not operational reporting. Frequently involves data visualization, executive information system and OLAP and outside the business) to work together through data sharing and electronic data interchange.

Knowledge management – program to make the company data driven through strategies and practices to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences that are true business knowledge. Knowledge management leads to learning management and regulatory compliance.

In addition to above, business intelligence also can provide a pro-active approach, such as ALARM function to alert immediately to end-user. There are many types of alerts, for example if some business value exceeds the threshold value the color of that amount in the report will turn RED and the business analyst is alerted. Sometimes an alert mail will be sent to the user as well. This end to end process requires data governance, which should be handled by the expert.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

Business Intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze and report data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart.

Types of BI Tools:

The key general categories of business intelligence tools are:

Spreadsheets

Reporting and querying software: tools that extract, sort, summarize and present selected data.

OLAP: Online analytical processing

Digital dashboards

Data mining

Data warehousing

Decision engineering

Process mining

Business performance management

Local information systems

Except for spreadsheets, these tools are sold as standalone tools, suites of tools, components of ERP systems, or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances.

Role of Dashboard in Business Intelligence Application

A business intelligence dashboard is a data visualization tool that displays the current status of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for an enterprise. Dashboards consolidate and arrange numbers, metrics and sometimes performance scorecards on a single screen. They may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted for a single point of view or department. The essential features of a BI dashboard product include a customizable interface and the ability to pull real-time data from multiple sources.Oracle and Microsoft are among the vendors of business intelligence dashboards. BI dashboards can also be created through other business applications, such as Excel. Business intelligence dashboards are sometimes referred to as enterprise dashboards.

The business intelligence dashboard is often confused with the performance scorecard. The main difference between the two, traditionally, is that a business intelligence dashboard, like the dashboard of a car, indicates the status at a specific point in time. A scorecard, on the other hand, displays progress over time towards specific goals. Dashboard and scorecard designs are increasingly converging. For example, some commercial dashboard products also include the ability to track progress towards a goal. A product combining elements of both dashboards and scorecards is sometimes referred to as a scoreboard.

Role of Dashboards in BI- Today and Tomorrow

There are a few features stated above which determine dashboards' role in today's business intelligence solution.But would be true to say that business intelligence cannot exist without dashboards? And - from the other point of view - would dashboards be useful without business intelligence? Both these questions are inseparably connected; nonetheless some dependencies might be described. At first, business intelligence is dashboards' reason for being. It would be hard to find another sensible reason for dashboards to function if there weren't BI. On the other hand, if not the dashboards, business intelligence wouldn't play its role efficiently enough. Dashboards are required to make it "intelligent". Without them, we would be having a bunch of separate tools which wouldn't be likely to cooperate, these days.Finally, is the role of dashboards common for all companies? No, it's not. Every company has own software implemented, therefore dashboard every time gets different tasks to cooperate. For some companies, dashboard might support planning, while for the general strategies another tool is used. All depends on managers, because there one thing is common for all. The thing is not how efficient a solution is but how efficiently a manager uses it, after all.

Role of dashboards in business intelligence is expected to grow in future. Vendors - and companies' IT departments as well - are working incessantly on improvements, therefore dashboards are expected to get better and better, and it's only a matter of time for so called ultimate dashboard to be developed. Up to now, today's dashboards support business intelligence quite efficiently, so the works on improvements aren't a priority, though.

ADVANTAGES OF DASHBOARDS IN BI

Decision making process and company’s performance aspect

Identify negative trends

Control negative trends

Improve the efficiency of newly-made decisions

Measure company’s parameters

Determine the goals and strategy as a whole

Dashboards’ influence on employees’ efficiency

Increase their efficiency and productivity thanks to automation

Saves time due to reduced number of reports required.

Quickly learn maintenance

Dashboards for employee motivation

Trace new trends with detailed reports

Concentrate on facts, not forms

Grow their interest

Easily understand strategy statements

DASHBOARD ON HR PAYROLL MANAGEMENT

The Dashboard on HR Payroll Management is a dashboard that helps HR Managers to understand and analyze the salary packages of all the employees in an organization. It gives a consolidated view of all the details related to:-

Number of employees with their date of joining

Headcount

Number of employees by salary

Payroll Breakdown

Salary Distribution

It consists of three sheets:

Dashboard

Employee Data

Calculations

Contd…

EMPLOYEE DATA

CALCULATIONS

CONCLUSION

Excel Dashboards and executive reports are powerful, fairly easy to design and a great way to improve your Excel and data visualization skills. Because of its flexibility, you can virtually design any dashboard in Excel exactly the way you, or the users, imagined. And, best of all, you may want to implement it yourself or consider it a prototype and ask IT to implement it.

Once you know what will the Excel dashboard be used for and what kind of metrics users expect, there are three major areas that you must address when creating it:

How to bring data into your spreadsheets;

How to manage the data and link it to the dashboard objects, like charts and tables;

How to design the dashboard report.

.

When you make a dashboard you need to know more about your organization, you must interact with users and managers, analyze data, make charts, connect the dashboard to the formal information structure (if possible), use advanced formulas and functions. It’s a complex and usually very enjoyable task for an information worker. You have to use a wide range of skills, and that can only improve your position in the workplace.

This is why an Excel dashboard is a great business tool and also a great learning project that goes beyond Excel and helps you to improve your lifelong skills