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Developing an Enterprise Business Intelligence Capability: the Norfolk Southern Journey

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Developing an Enterprise Business Intelligence Capability:
The Norfolk Southern Journey

Business intelligence applications are the latest trend in the technology world. These applications not only help in gathering and storing data but also processing and analyzing it to make better informed decisions for its users as individuals and corporate level decisions.
The article about the Norfolk Southern journey as a business intelligent firm emphasizes that it might sound easy to implement Business intelligence but in reality it is a prolonged journey of strategic decisions. It starts from understanding the business in depth and looking for areas of improvement with respect to customer service, workforce productivity, managing assets and costs.
Norfolk started its journey with the Thoroughbred Operating Plan, to redesign its operations. This plan helped them to optimize inventory management and trip planning using operations research techniques for the new transaction based information systems. The application had a performance dashboard recording the actual and deviations from the train plans.
The development of accessNS system helped them improve their customer services. This application allowed customers to access real-time information about shipments online rather than waiting on phone or expecting call backs.
The process also involves closely knitting all the departments together to share information and process data that is usable, integrated and structured for making decisions. Business strategy when accompanied with quality data and BI Tools for reporting and answering queries can lead to high quality business value.
Another important aspect that needs attention is that the user requirements keep changing so should the results from these BI applications. As stated in the article that earlier users needed visibility into operations but over the time

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