The emergence of business intelligence was regarded as a huge boost to aid managers in decision making. The BI becomes ineffective when a subsidiary has it but the top management in the parent company does not support its use. The first pitfall is that the top management failed to identify clear business goals of their subsidiary. Caterpillar tunneling Canada Corporation chose BI tools according to the goals it had to achieve and when the parent company does not support these tools then failure is inevitable.
Secondly, the success of any BI requires that all the users involved must be actively engaged. The top management was not fully engaged on the use of BI at CTCC. The parent company needed to apply effective change management in order to have the BI infrastructure at CTCC running effectively and smoothly.
The third pitfall lack of understanding by the top management on what is needed for the BI to function properly. Support from the management would ease the use of IT infrastructure at the subsidiary and also ensure sustainability. Lack of this support derails BI projects which might also stop the business intelligence initiatives before they are even started.
The main business needs at CTCC are proper and relevant IT infrastructure, proper auditing, and consolidation of its market base. All these three are interconnected in that information technology enables the company to use the best BI tools in making its decisions. The decisions include what is needed to consolidate and enlarge its market base. Proper auditing would help the subsidiary to prove to the parent company that the current BI tools used by the subsidiary are of much significance and would bring more profit to both companies. All these needs require proper analysis to enable the company make proper decisions concerning its priorities.
Business intelligence deals mainly with the transformation of raw data to meaningful figures that can be used to make decisions in an organization. The enterprise resource planning allows for integration and automation of the useful information generated by BI into business functions. The real time information from that results from the integration of BI and ERP enables the management to make fast decisions (Del Giudice 263). BI also avails data at the user’s finger tips. Every stakeholder can obtain any required data without having to enter information into spreadsheet in order to create a report for them. Everything is in real time. The use of cubes by the BI makes information reporting easier to those who are not well conversant with technical terms. The raw data stored by the BI tools enable user to access data and store it in a way that they would easily understand.
Summary
New subsidiaries like CTCC require support from the parents companies to help them achieve their BI objectives. Well integration of the BI tools and ERP would enable the subsidiary to identify and cater for all its business needs.
SWOT
Reporting systems enable the CTCC to utilize its resources to the maximum. Analysis of the multidimensional dataset enabled record hours of work (Leung $ Kristal). Sufficient information from the BI enabled sales division and the field services to generate forecast the sales needed in future and number of spare parts required. The analysis of the historical data on spare parts enabled the engineers to estimate the optimum stock needed.
Cancellation of the BI system placed a lot of dependency on the remaining systems. Inefficiency arose due to the inconsistency in adoption of the system by the users. Diversification of the products, replacement and maintenance of machines would make CTCC more competitive once again.
Works cited
Leung, Frances & Kristal Murat. Caterpillar tunneling: revitalizing user adoption of business intelligence. Nov 29, 2013.
Del Giudice, Manlio. “Discovering the Internet of Things (IoT) within the business process management: a literature review on technological revitalization.” Business Process Management Journal 22.2 (2016): 263-270.