Leadership wanted to see “how it was,” “how it is now,” and “what was the impact of the change.” They wanted to know “how did an acquisition affect our target/goals? For better or worse?” To compound the problem, business units across verticals were structured and operated very differently from each other. They support different markets, some organized by franchises then regions, some structured by regions, some by products. The firm could not structure the data with the consistency required for a BI solution to help answer the right performance questions.
To deal with the complexities of answering performance questions, they had to create custom frameworks and analysis graphics using BI systems and with a lot of asterisks to explain *this includes x but not y*. There was simply not a single view/framework that worked for all business units. So they used customized reports to bring relevant data together and report it out in a way that makes sense for a decision-maker. Furthermore, they needed to dynamically make changes but be able to keep history.
