How Does it Work?
Bime is a lightweight BI offering, combining fast analytics with cutting edge visualizations, but without the heavy technical or financial investment common with more traditional BI models.
Bime allows you to connect to your existing data and interrogate it. It categorizes your data automatically, allowing you to load the whole range of information into a pivot table to be available for ‘queries’. You create your query by dragging and dropping the relevant data onto the frame, which starts as a simple grid. Once you are happy that you have included the basic information wanted, you can change the visualization to see, rather than read, your results. You can then add elements to fine-tune the results visually (using size or color, for example) to a degree that a column of numbers cannot express.
Confusing technical vocabulary? Check out the Bime Glossary.
Once you have finished your query, you can load it onto a dashboard – a multi-frame display that allows you to share your findings with others. The benefit of a dashboard is that it can include as few or as many queries as you wish, so can show results from two or more data sources in the same place; there is no flicking between tabs or programs in Bime. Thus, financial reports from your accounting package can sit next to client reports from your CRM database, and you can see a coherent picture of your business, with as wide or narrow a focus as you want.
If you share your dashboards with others, you remain in control: you can give them the ability to ‘post-process’ the data, to filter it to reflect their interest, or you can apply these filters yourself, restricting what your viewers see. If you have teams based in various countries, a filter can mean that each team can see only its own country results, and the global results – one dashboard can provide this tailored view for all, without the need for replication.
What are the benefits?
The advantages of the Bime approach are those of the SaaS model, with no capital investment or IT architecture needed, but secure hosting, automatic upgrades, ‘always on’ functionality, and access wherever there is an internet connection. Add to this the user-friendly interface and the accessible pricing model, and this is a simple way for all organizations to have advanced BI capability, or add to their existing systems.
The benefits of the product are that it is:
- a combined solution, allowing you to address BI and business performance needs simultaneously
- a collaborative solution, allowing the fast sharing of data, feedback and conversations
- a visual (and attractive) solution, enabling complex datasets to be presented in an easily digestible way
- a flexible solution, not just in terms of how you present your data, but also how you share it, and with whom
- a quick solution, with important information being delivered fast and in real time.
Who can use Bime?
Bime means ‘BI for me’ – unlike many BI systems which require deep technical knowledge and additional IT resources, our system can be used by anybody. The ability to create queries is limited to specified individuals, but how and the extent to which you share the results of those queries is entirely up to you. Also, this sharing is not ‘read-only’ (unless you want it to be!) as the dashboard post-processing functions can allow your viewers deeper access to the results than ‘just’ a chart, and our messaging function allows viewers and users alike to start and carry on conversations about what they are looking at.
Bime is designed to be accessible at several levels:
- users are specified individuals who have the ability to make connections to data, formulate queries, and create dashboards. These can be owned by a particular user, or shared between them at a ‘query’ level, so data can be shown and analysis undertaken in real time.
- viewers are all those given access to a finished dashboard – the extent to which they can see and filter data can be set for different groups, meaning that Bime can be used to communicate not only internally, but with clients/customers interested in seeing their accounts in a new way, contacts/leads with whom you want to share your results, or anybody else with whom you want to share information.
Bime can be used by any organization, of any size, to visualize its data. The security of the servers and the connection mechanisms we use might be beyond the budget of small and medium-sized enterprises, so this, and the ‘pay as you go’ approach of SaaS makes Bime a very attractive choice for SMEs. However, as it is able to sit on top of already installed in-house OLAP and other analytic architecture, it is also a valuable tool for larger organisations with an existing BI facility, and evolving BI and business performance needs.
To see how some of our current users use Bime, take a look at our client testimonials.
The visualizations possible with Bime have many uses – not just monitoring performance and undertaking analysis ‘live’, but to boost more traditional ways of presenting results, including in-year reporting such as management accounts, displaying year-end results to your team or the wider public, attracting new business, marketing to potential investors, or keeping existing clients and customers up-to-date. Whatever your reasons for wanting to see and share your results, Bime can help you.
