An integrated business intelligence model for automotive component manufacturers in South Africa

Organisations face increasing economic pressures from local and global competitors because of changing and increasing customer demands. Demands include improved product quality, flexibility, increasing price competitiveness and attaining higher levels of customer satisfaction. Businesses must have strategic and operational plans in place to combat these pressures to remain competitive. The South African automotive component manufacturing industry is particularly susceptible to such factors. The nature of the industry further lends itself to attracting high levels of political and economic attention, as it is an important contributor to economic growth. Harsh economic conditions pose problems in supply, internal supply and distribution and force organisations to be resourceful to survive. Ninety percent of the world’s information was generated within the last two years, a figure that equates to 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. The proliferation of data sources and the fine level of granularity at which this data is collected, present organisations with new challenges to benefit from this information. Market volatility presents shorter windows of opportunity and demands an unprecedented level of agility from the organisation. Delays in decision making, which is becoming more complicated and complex, cannot be tolerated. Advances in Technology have made it possible and affordable to store vast volumes of data; data that can be manipulated and transformed by any number of technology tools. Business intelligence (BI) provides valuable information to management and decision makers by reducing the latency between business events and the ability to report and act on prior events. This treatise will investigate the business intelligence systems of an automotive component manufacturing company and propose a model to improve BI utilisation. The true name of the company that will be researched will not be disclosed for confidentiality reasons, instead it will be called My Company. Research consists of a preliminary study to identify the problems in the business intelligence system within My Company. Literature reviews of critical success factors for business intelligence systems, maturity models, and characteristics of integrated business intelligence systems, will lead to the development of a proposed integrated business intelligence systems model to improve the current situation at My Company. The major findings of this research are presented as deliverables within each chapter and contribute to the development of the integrated BI systems model for automotive component manufacturing organisations. The major findings are: a list of critical success factors of BI from literature; list identifying gaps between the literature reviewed and the problems identified from the preliminary study conducted; selection of the HP (2009) maturity model as a preferred tool to be incorporated into the proposed model; the evaluation of the proposed integrated BI systems model by means of a case study; and the updated integrated BI systems model