Production Intelligence: The Missing Piece Of Business Intelligence

Accurate and timely information for decision making, rather than intuition, is what organizations are seeking today, according to a recent business intelligence survey of business and IT professionals. The "2005 BI Peer Review," conducted by Knightsbridge Solutions, polled more than 2,000 respondents at all levels of business and IT. Of these, 65 percent named actionable or operational business intelligence as one of their most relevant issues.

Companies are taking steps to better organize their enterprise data and enhance analytics capabilities, but for organizations that rely on high volume document production as a key business process, this type of intelligence has been difficult to obtain.

For a long time, the focus was on applying technology to solve certain application challenges, like use of lightweight paper, conditional inserts, and digital color. Now that these problems have been stabilized and as operations become more business-driven, they have a greater need to know more about how well they are using the technology, instead of what they are using.

Production Intelligence (PI) translates into real value when it helps users to:

• Integrate and modify workflow easily and affordably as customer requirements increase or change.
• Implement an "any to any" system without excessive translation effort and cost
• Manipulate workflow without placing a burden on IT resources
• Simplify and optimize production management
• Identify a problem and a plan before a situation becomes an emergency
• Capture and use information across the total enterprise production process, not just printing