User:Jag2000

/BIfFI

/Business Intelligence for Finance

BIfFI
BIfFI is Business Intelligence for FInance. Its a model that could be deployed through Business Intelligence (BI) applications to focus on functions of Finance. Its a concept that has been initiated by Jagjit Singh, an IT Architect.

The key common functions of Finance are
 * Billing


 * Invoice validations and Payments


 * Reconciliation and Settlements


 * Reporting and Performance Management

In present marketplace, BI products and solutions are more commonly applied to Reporting and Performance Management for Finance. The first three common functions of Finance are usually either left to the Financial and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages or bespoke developed applications.

A few key characteristics of typical enterprise Finance applications are


 * Finance processing, especially bulk and cyclic billing, payments and reconciliation, involves huge data processing tasks


 * Finance is based on closed-out transactional and meta data


 * Bulk billing could be mining millions of transactions during every cycle (of billing)


 * Estimated billing could be based on millions of historic transactions and further millions of external records


 * The functions around validation of invoices (before clearing out payments) itself could be a huge toll on processing resources


 * Huge need of processing resources for bulk billing impacts the Business-as-usual


 * Frequent and serious discrepancies observed between the billed data (from disparate transaction systems) and reported data (consolidated from disparate transaction system onto operational data store)


 * Finance applications implemented through Off-the-shelf packages are often heavily customised leading to higher RTB costs

As the requirements and characteristics of key Finance functions are similar to the other applications of Business Intelligence i.e. Reporting, Data Warehouse and Performance Mgmt.

The BIfFI model proposes to


 * Design and deploy Business Intelligence to deliver all Finance functions


 * A single instance that services all needs from charge calculations, invoice generation, reporting, budgeting and forecasting


 * BI writes and stores back the transactional data from charge calculations and invoices

The detailing of BIfFI model is in-progress.


 * Introduction to BIfFI


 * Blog by Jagjit on Business Intelligence for FInance