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Valuable information has been registered in operational databases, as those of the accounting information system. But usually this information is difficult and almost impossible to use. To perform the managerial duties of an organization (forecasting, organizing, coordinating, training and controlling-evaluating) on terms of competition and uncontrolled change of market parameters, means to use some information products able to meet the requirements of time in making decisions, as well as to identify some possible decisions from which to choose the optimal one. Because the existing reporting systems did not cover all fields of interest within an in-depth analysis of a business process, some business intelligence solutions were developed.
The goal of BI solutions is to offer customized analyses to the right users, at the right time, enabling them to make better business decisions. The companies need to implement analyses to hundreds or even thousands of users, assuring, at the same time, that they all have access to the latest operations.
The demand for dynamic multidimensional systems used to support the intelligent and predictive decision making processes, has determined the development of the systems of BI type (Buytendijk, 1999). These systems become more and more complex, being able of a multidimensional analysis of data and display real abilities of statistics and predictive analysis in order to serve much more to the decision- assisted systems.
Business intelligence represents the assembly of the activities of researching, collecting, treating and transmitting useful information to the economic agents, with a view to get competitive advantages, by its exploitation in a defensive or/and offensive way (Biere, 2003). The BI applications of assisted decisions facilitate a great number of activities, including the multidimensional analysis, data mining, the predictable capacity, the business analysis, the inquiry, reporting and graphics designing facilities, the geo-space analysis, the knowledge management etc. (Turban, Aronson, Liang, & Sharda, 2007).
Business intelligence (BI) is a powerful instrument that the companies can use to improve the organizational performance offering valuable information for all the parties involved in the business. BI has become such a comprising concept that we must take a few minutes to revise it. Firstly, BI includes disciplines that are connected to each other, yet divided. Thus BI can be divided into four basic zones (Moss & Atre, 2003):
1 Data integration refers to the modality that allows data from different business processes, programs, platforms and systems to be assimilated so as to create consistent information that can be trusted an easily used.
- 2.
Data management means creating a central deposit to stock data in a form and location that makes them more accessible to the analysis engine.
- 3.
Analysis is a term used for mining, modeling and optimizing data to estimate the tendencies that will be communicated to the decision makers.
- 4.
Reporting allows final users to see and show the results in a personalized form.
BI comes with a tempting offer under the form of a platform meant to bring together and to interrogate information in due time helping users to anticipate changes and to act accordingly.
The BI concept represents an architecture and a collection of applications and integrated operative databases, as well as of systems based on decision assistance, that provide to the business community easy access to the data on the respective business (Kimball, Reeves, Ross, & Thornthwaite, 1998). The BI concept represents a series of marketing techniques and analyses which can be fulfilled with the help of a special software. By means of this system, the experts analyse the internal data of a company. The BI concept focuses on the interdepartmental activities of a company, the analysis of material and informational flows as well as the improvement strategies of the activities inside of the company (Brannback, 1997.).