EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence Solutions

The Problem: Most Business Users Don't Have Access to Business Intelligence (BI).

The great irony of BI today is that of all of the money spent on BI solutions, only a small percentage of an organization's user community are actually able to realize value from the BI investment. Unfortunately, it is the operational personnel that really need detailed tactical insight and access to key business information who are the furthest away from it. Business users who are the most able to act on the information quickly to nip problems in the bud or exploit potential opportunities lack easy access to relevant information in order to make timely and informed decisions.

The Solution: EasyAsk Gives Business Users Rapid Access to Relevant Information

With Progress EasyAsk® for Operational BI, business users in departments or throughout the organization can gain easy access to the timely information they need to make informed decisions that deliver results. Most operational business managers can't easily access information that's relevant to their specific needs because BI tools have traditionally been deployed in support of executive or financial analyst requirements.

In addition, due to the complexity of these traditional BI tools and limited analyst resources, operational business users are left waiting for reporting requests and unable to drill down and probe information when needed. EasyAsk makes existing BI reporting assets visible and, for those specific, dynamic and personal requests from the operational user, it delivers an answer that may be refined and probed as needed — without specialist skills or training.

Use Natural Language to Ask Questions

With EasyAsk, business users get the ability to ask simple, natural-language questions such as:

• What are my most profitable product lines by sales channel?
• Which customers have past due invoices greater than $10,000?
• Which customers bought product X but not product Y this year?
• Which reps have reduced their forecast by more than 10% this week?

EasyAsk for Operational BI Empowers Business Users

EasyAsk empowers business users and provides the simplicity of a search user experience, avoiding the complexity of traditional BI tools. The result is that companies can:

Provide Easy-to-Use Access to Timely Information

A simple user interface provides near real-time access to timely information. Users can ask natural questions or enter specific terms and EasyAsk will provide access to information from multiple sources to enable swift and informed decision-making—without having to wait for IT or analysts to create reports or ad hoc queries. EasyAsk makes BI as easy-to-use as Web search.

Accelerate Access to Relevant Data

EasyAsk provides timely access to relevant information so operations personnel can make more informed business decisions. EasyAsk eliminates the time-consuming process of requesting a report from an analyst and then following up with the analyst for further refinement.

Deliver Greater Access to BI Assets

Users get easy access to BI assets located in repositories across the enterprise and have the opportunity to build from these standard reports or dashboards to further probe for more information. As users type into the search box, key information is exposed that can help to shed light on blind spots, highlight similar requests from other users, and expose existing reporting assets that may provide greater insight into the area of interest.

Leverage Existing BI Tools

Many companies that use EasyAsk have invested in complex BI tools that don't satisfy the needs of business line managers or their operational business users. With EasyAsk, our customers leverage the investment they have already made in existing BI tools to give business line managers a way to easily find the information they need by simply typing a question or phrase in English — just the way you would ask a question in a conversation.

The extended enterprise represents a broad community of potential beneficiaries of timely business information. Each stakeholders needs access to the business information that meets their unique needs in a simple, familiar and intuitive manner. EasyAsk provides an affordable solution to quickly drive BI into the extended enterprise.

Operational BI: Using EasyAsk, employees, partners, and customers validate ideas, identify problems and maximize revenue from either existing or ad hoc reports.

Analytical BI: Analysts are more productive since operational users can self-serve, allowing the analysts to focus on the most complex queries.

Strategic BI: Executives use EasyAsk to quickly drill down to understand the underlying trends behind changes in their key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards or scorecards.