For many people it can be quite a problem to make the perfect decisions if you got no facts or data to make that decision upon. For instance, imagine you are the CEO of a 500 people company and you need to increase sales by 15%. There are plenty of ways to do that.. a new marketing campagne, increase the sales staff, get more partners etc. but are your company ready for the addition pressure a 15% increase in sale will bring? Maybe the production line won’t have much problem creating the additional parts, but can your suppliers deliver the additional materials, do you have enough storage for the incresed amount of products? Can your logistics department handle the extra load?
All questions the CEO can find by asking the person in charge of each department. But with a good information management system the CEO could instead lookup all of these informations on his computer and in just a few minutes be able to make the right decision. This is one of the reasons business intelligence tools and other types of decision support systems (DSS) have been so popular these days. But all of these systems does require large amounts of data in order to work properly. With a good management information system you already got all of these data gathered in one place and it will then be easy to pull various statistics from these data and use them to make better decisions. There are many types of these systems such as the Targit BI system, the ZAP Business Intelligence and the pavillion tool, just to mention a few.
Most larger companies already use some kind of ERP system (enterprise resource planning) which automatically stores most of their relevant data such as budget, sales statistics, employee and customer information ect. You can then add a business intelligence system or a decision support system on top of your ERP system and within a short time be able to get all kinds of relevant data and display them in a way that make sense and help you make the best possible decisions on behalf of your company.
DC supply which produce container have recently upgraded their pavillon system in order to improve their dss abilities which have lead to quite some improvements.