Why Bi Reporting Is Better Than Traditional Mis Reporting

By Author: Bappaditta Jana
Total Articles: 71
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According to Ken Moelis-an American billionaire, “In each business, there is a process, or a delivery system or information system, that is changing rapidly under them.” The saying perfectly fits today’s business environment when one who does not embrace change perishes sooner or later.

Gone are the days of doing every task manually. Now, automation is there in every industry, regardless of its type and size. No surprises that the traditional MIS reporting of the 1970s is now fading away gradually. MIS means Management Information System, and MIS reporting is a kind of reporting that makes use of the information within a company to help the management to understand the performance of their organization and in making meaningful business decisions.

MIS reporting is getting replaced by BI reporting, and the reasons are plenty. However, before digging out the reasons, let’s look at an example. A person joined a bank in its analytics department. On the first day of his job, he came to know that there is no specific system or process to connect the different databases so that he can quickly access the information ...
... stored over them. To create a business report and streamline all the reports; he needs to copy-paste the data from multiple excel sheets in one place, which is time-consuming and laborious.

Now, what should he do? So, here comes the business information reporting to rescue! It is a business analytical reporting that does not present the data in one or two dimensions as it is in the case of MIS reports.

When a manager is looking for sales trends or customer behavior patterns, an MIS report seems insufficient because the information that he or she needs is not in a single table. BI reporting is not new and has been there for the last 10-15 years. It is only recently that the use of business reporting tools has gained momentum as they have become affordable for the majority of businesses.

Advantages of BI reporting over MIS reporting

• MIS reporting incorporates a lot of dashboards to present the data collected from various databases, whereas BI reporting represents the collected and analyzed data on a single intuitive dashboard that make things easier for decision-makers and results in quick decision making
• In BI reporting, authorized people within the organization can have access to the requisite reports from any location. They can access them even by a mobile app and can also upload them to a cloud server. However, such flexibility is not available in MIS reporting.
• BI reporting makes it easier to predict future happenings such as the possible number of sales of a particular item or the future trend of the customer buying pattern by its predictive analysis feature. On the other hand, such useful insights into the future are a remote possibility when an organization relies on MIS reporting.

It is not that traditional MIS reporting is becoming obsolete. However, it is proved beyond any doubt that BI reporting is far better and can help the key decision-makers to make quick business decisions that can prove beneficial for the overall health of their organization.

Bappaditta Jana is a blogger who loves to spend his free time engaging in sports or gardening. Based in Kolkata, he is currently working with EasyReports an IT firm that has developed a BI reporting tool that can easily integrate with Tally ERP and many other applications.