In order to understand the basic philosophy of the CEC solution, one should firstly understand the industry accepted process for developing a Business Intelligence system as well as the 6 typical steps within the process.

• Step 1 – Define and agree reporting outcomes with the client
• Step 2 – Align reporting requirements with the ERP system artefacts
• Step 3 – Identify data sources required to populate artefacts
• Step 4 – Validate the quality of the data source
• Step 5 – Collate data from all sources into the artefacts structure
• Step 6 – Report information in the required reporting outputs

Although this process is sound, CEC realises that the business purpose of such a process is not to generate a report (data and information) but rather to support a business decision within a timely fashion. The figure below illustrates how data, information, business decisions and the resulting actions are related to each other within the strategic decision making framework.



The traditional BI approach takes a large amount of time to generate data and distil it into information. CEC speeds up the process to allow clients to move from data to information in a fraction of the time leading to more time being available for better quality decisions and also being able to make decisions quicker than in the traditional approach. This is done through the following innovations.

• Step 1 – We have predefined management and operational reports based on years of practical management experience
• Step 2 – Pre-defined ERP artefact alignment based on extensive experience in the ERP systems environment
• Step 4 – Pre-defined automated validation routines again based on years of solving source data validity problems
• Step 5 and 6 – Once validated, collation and reporting of data is automated within the CEC system
  The proprietary intellectual capital within these innovations provides CEC with the ability to harness your enterprise intelligence and use your existing information assets better.