Sales and marketing

• The sales department can use BI to identify sales trends over time.
• Forecasts can be developed to plan and to identify sales metrics for the future.
• Sales managers can monitor and manage team performance

Operations

• BI can be used to help maintain quality control within the organization.
• Line of business (LOB) managers can use regular updates of product status to identify quality status.

Finance and accounting

• Finance and accounting teams use performance management tools to collaborate with one another, get approval from other departments, or simply follow a set of procedures to close month-end or create budgets.

Human resources (HR)

• Metrics can be set to determine performance goals and measure how employees are performing
• HR can determine if there are trends based on misuse of medical benefits, sick days taken, and whether incentive programs are having the desired effects.

Business Drivers

• By setting metrics to monitor performance, and identifying how organizations stack up against their competitors in the marketplace, organizations can capture timely information to help drive organizational performance.
• Whether using BI or BPM, organizations can manage, maintain, and drive decision making and measure the identified metrics against how the organization is actually performing.

• Compare which products support the right mix of reporting, analytics, business performance management, data warehousing, and workflow requirements for your company.
• Evaluate predictive analytics and forecasting support for your industry.
• Shortlist vendors based on appropriate data integration capabilities and technical fit.