We have provided below the kind of operational questions which a BI tool can answer:

1. Is our building project staying on budget?

A company wishes to monitor capital expenditure during a project to build substantial amount of additional car parking space. They need to be able to capture and report upon progress during the project, through a number of milestones, and report upon progress, tracking costs against budgets, and where savings have been realised. A BI tool can assist in acting as a collection tool, with the project dates being updated from emailed forms, and by extracting financial outlays from a financial database.

2. How can we optimise the deployment of our appliances?

A public services organisation wish to manage their distibution appliances across throughout the region. A BI tool can assist in reporting on the frequency of appliance call-outs, and report on the number of applicances in attendance, on a geographic co-ordinates basis.

3. How effective is our TV advertising campaign?

A company need to be able to track the performance of their sales operations across the country, during a major TV advertising campaign. They need to be able to track new sales by region, outlet and by salesperson. A BI tool can provide insight into which regions are performing well, and which salespeople are achieving their targets.

4. How well are our customer services teams handling the periodic increases in support requests?

A company wishes to ensure that the number of services employees, and their levels of product knowledge, is sufficient to handling potential increases in the volumes of calls. A BI tool is needed to report on the types and volumes of calls handled by team and by first and second level support, including the average call lengths and average call queue lengths.