Business Intelligence
What does an asset cost a company to create? How much should a company charge its client for its services? These questions often plague financial executives, primarily because they are very difficult to answer without a technical way to connect asset creation to time, billing and invoicing. With its built-in expression language, TACTIC can connect to most internal systems, whether they are new or legacy systems. This provides companies with powerful insights that feed directly into strategic decisions.
Image: TACTIC Workflow Dashboard
Forrester Research slotted TACTIC as a Business Intelligence tool and a Smart Process Application. Enterprise Apps Today also featured Southpaw Technology and TACTIC in an article entitled “5 Open Source Business Intelligence Tools”. The article outlines the changing attitude towards Open Source Business Intelligence software within enterprises and how it is changing the selection process of software offerings in this space.
Interestingly, Southpaw solutions are increasingly considered on par with big-name vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle and SAS. Why is this happening? Southpaw Technology’s CTO, Remko Noteboom, believes it to be the following:
- “At Southpaw we adhere to a strict set of development rules on why and how we can solve an issue using our own framework and expression language, substituting software modules and making source code changes to others. All this as our QA team surfaces new bugs to be squashed in next week’s sprint.
- We’re making applications at Southpaw; specific, problem solving, industry aligned, tools to help people and companies be more intelligent. We don’t hide our code; transparency is at the core of our business. It’s the ultimate test drive. Given our ability to change quickly we offer rapid application development and modular deployment that keeps costs low and change management simple.”
TACTIC provides a business intelligence open source option, along with various solutions that are working for more and more enterprise level clients, in part because of its powerful statistical and graphing libraries that allow for customized dashboards.
Executives, Managers and all team members can take advantage of customized dashboards to track key performance indicators. Graphing capabilities in TACTIC, including key performance indicators, can easily be customized to display insights from custom schemas and records. Customers identify quickly what their users are contributing and how those files are being distributed, repurposed and shared.
Record types, workflow stages and statuses can also be customized using an integrated visual workflow editor provided in the administrative portal. This system includes full security controls that guarantee assets can only be viewed or edited by authorized team members. User groups for management team can leverage built-in project management features to connect files to people, tasks, calendars and notes.
Initially important to identify what the core set of metrics that are most valuable to your organization and then use a solid well developed and stable platform – preferably one that provides a variety of features and functionality such as:
| Visualization | Analytics | Data Access | Extensibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dashboards | In-memory | Database management | API and URL calls |
| Data Discovery | Data trends | Integration ability (API) | Logical Query Engine |
| Reporting | Forecasting | Metadata management | Reusability |
TACTIC is designed to support user-defined workflows and visual interfaces for moving or interacting with any data. All desired information can be represented using custom records and users can create very specific and individualized workflows for each custom type.
Built-in dashboards provide a quick overview of the overall state of all the activity. Report generation tools allow for quick searching on Work Order items (text and graphics) based on criteria like due dates, start dates and status and view the Work Order items that fall within that criteria. These Work Order items are further broken into time frames, for example, by the current week or previous month, to provide an overview of production rates and volume.
TACTIC offers flexibility and efficiency in its searching abilities to provide related results on any information entered in the system fast. It’s simple (faceted) and advanced searching allows for searching on any and all metadata defined in the database to extract only results that are needed.
The TACTIC Workflow Editor enables organizations to design workflow processes providing an interactive tool that can define, improve and test business processes prior to implementation. This ultimately translates into effective business process mapping.
The right business intelligence will give your organization powerful insight into the entire organization and how information flows between the people within it. TACTIC can empower your teams with the business intelligence and tools they need to make informed decisions quickly.
