In a typical business environment, there are one or more transactional data systems that contain information about the activity of a business. A Point-Of-Sale (POS) system contains transactional purchases, a Human Resources application records labor costs, Accounting software may identify general ledger entries. Before the advent of a Business Intelligence solution, businesses had to rely on manual collation of these values to calculate measures identified across systems.
A Business Intelligence solution provides an automated approach to this problem. By identifying the source of these disparate data sources, mapping how they correspond to each other, and publishing reports to end users, the manual process of combining these data elements can be avoided.