BOARD International: A Culture of Innovation in Business Intelligence

Overview | Selected Company Profiles

BOARD International: A Culture of Innovation in Business Intelligence

Organizations are increasingly looking for single platform to facilitate efficient decision making rather than relying on individually packaged labels such as BI or EPM (Enterprise Performance Management). “BI, Analytics, Data Discovery, Data Preparation, EPM are all terms created by vendors to define technical capabilities,” says Giovanni Grossi, CEO of Swiss based BOARD International,“but those capabilities alone only provide a partial solution to the real problem.” Therefore, for enterprises, it is not just about the available technologies but establishing a better connection between them to get the full decision support and management systems that they need.

The firm originally conceptualized this visionary approach in 1994 as Management Intelligence and today offers a unitary environment for Business Intelligence and EPM. BOARD has pioneered this approach by adhering to five key principles ease of use, speed, user self sufficiency, all in one capabilities, and low total cost of ownership (TCO). The BOARD platform provides a unified logical repository to gather a company’s data, objectives, and metrics in order to manage the entire decision making cycle: from data analysis, to simulation and forecasting; from goal settings, to integrated business planning; from performance monitoring, to reformulation of the strategic objectives.

Recently BOARD released enhanced In-memory technology within the BOARD 10 platform, to offer auto-modeling predictive analytics and to exploit advanced predictive algorithms in daily analysis. Another 2015 innovation was a self-service data preparation function to allow business users to create customized analyses from raw data in a few clicks, without compromising their overall data governance.BOARD also launched a cloud version of its platform, which allows customers to choose the delivery model more suited to their needs.

More than 3000 customers in 50 countries rely on BOARD to manage their businesses through comprehensive, well informed and timely decision making. For example, “H&M uses BOARD for worldwide Shop Workforce Planning.

BOARD unifies Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management in a single platform, providing unmatched effectiveness to decision-making processes of the entire organization

Information collected in over 4000 shops are rolled up on a global level and merged in near real time with sales and financial information, to provide Stockholm headquarters with an immediate visibility of performance across the entire organization.

This process requires the smooth interaction between business intelligence, analytics, simulation, business modelling, financial planning, and operational planning. Most importantly, the tremendous results H&M achieves every day with BOARD could not possibly be achieved with just a simple BI or Data Discovery Solution, nor with just an EPM or a planning application.

“This is what we mean when we say that BOARD is the number one decision making platform and not simply a tool for EPM or BI,” says Mr. Grossi.

Forging ahead, BOARD International wants to add further credence to its vision by evolving enhanced innovations in technologies that can further facilitate their platform in big-data capacities and project the architectural changes needed to support the vision. “BOARD represents a radical innovation in their capability to link decision making processes to their objectives, from strategy formulation to operational level, with an outstanding performance improvement,” concludes Mr. Grossi.