BI stands for business intelligence. While a lot of the jargon used in the corporate sphere is not always easily understood for the uninitiated, the concept of business intelligence is pretty true to its name, and this blog will look at Shepherd’s own BI functionality.
BI That Tells You What Matters Most
In plainest terms, the BI tool will tell a company if they are doing things well or badly, since it is essentially a profitability report. And a company that is not profitable has work to do.
A profitability report is only any use if it helps identify where profitability exists and where it is lacking. Shepherd’s grouping function makes this easy, allowing reports to focus on service contracts, customers, or service orders, to name but a few. Other criteria that can be applied are to group by technician, location, or equipment, machine, service contract, or rental contract, as well as objects relevant to asset, service, and rental managers.
Some might want to point out that this is far from being a unique functionality in a BI solution—after all, the ability to produce reports about specifics of a company’s operations is what it’s all about. It is at this point that one should realise Shepherd is an EAM that is native to NetSuite, and this has advantages—distinct advantages.
In fact, they could all be wrapped up in one concept: the General Ledger, or GL.
Third-party solutions offer profitability reporting on a number of operations within a company, based on its own surrogate calculations. They will pull data from different sources to produce very detailed reports. But these will always be at some degree of separation from the GL, since they are not NetSuite native.
The General Ledger, for those not familiar with it, is the last and final repository of financial data on which all legal, investment, and state calculations are based. It’s really rather important.
General Ledger Access Makes the Difference
Based on what is in there, shareholders may vote one way or the other at the AGM, the tax board may ask for more or for less, and banks may approve or reject loans or loan renegotiations. And anything that might look like tampering with the GL could land the person responsible in uncomfortably warm legal water.
All that to say, it’s the cornerstone of a firm’s bookkeeping, and if Business Intelligence reports can be based on the GL, their reliability and robustness outstrip the estimated numbers third-party companies are forced to rely on.
And if there’s one thing a CEO will value when faced with a crucial business decision, it’s having faith in the data used to support that decision. No matter how vigilant and rigorous data management may be, relying on a source other than the GL introduces the risk of inaccuracy. That might not be a big worry when it comes to buying 6 new laptops for the roving sales team, but it certainly will when deciding on which drill heads to install next on an offshore rig.
Purpose-Built Scripting for Deeper Insights
What makes Shepherd’s BI offering particularly good, and able to perform functions that NetSuite itself cannot due to the search complexities it would entail, is that Shepherd achieves its goal through purpose-built scripting, which can reach deeper into the database than searches or Analytics do
In other words, if you want to reach those levels of data purity, then Shepherd is the way to go.
With it, you can take the service contract, the equipment record with all its datapoints, the service location, the service order, or the technician doing the work as the basis for a report. All of these are permutations that you can apply.
Such is its versatility, you can even produce calculations of what past service orders would have cost a customer had they not opted for a service contract, meaning you can present solid numbers for what you have saved that customer in costs, be it in parts or in labor. At that point, every dollar saved becomes an argument in favour of keeping you on as the service provider for the maintenance of their assets.
If it’s a case of looking inward at one’s own operations, cost-to-profit comparisons between different equipment can shed light on which is actually cheaper to own, and not just cheaper to buy. And perhaps the answer will differ depending on the climate it operates in.
The core issue here is how accurate a company wants its BI to be. If it’s just to give the company a somewhat vague direction to go in, most BI solutions will deliver enough to work with. If it’s a highly accurate course heading that is desired, where the destination could be as exact as the eye of a needle, Shepherd’s scripted analysis of NetSuite’s GL is the way to go.
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