Breaking news from the JTL-Partner Convention: With JTL-BI, a business intelligence solution is making its way into our product catalog. However, anyone who thinks that we are talking about far-off dreams of the future is mistaken. The project has long since outgrown the concept phase. In the following, we will show you what JTL-BI can do, how far development has progressed and what the future holds.
Breaking NewsAt this year’s JTL-Partner Convention, we will be presenting updates on current projects and our roadmap to our partner landscape. For example, a first test version of the JTL POS system JTL-POS is currently being used there. At the time of publication of this blog post, there is a presentation on a brand new project from our company: the business intelligence solution JTL-BI. You can find out about the new analytics product that we are currently developing almost as soon as our partners do!
What is behind BI
Business intelligence may not mean anything to everyone: this is the ability to evaluate comprehensive company key figures and present them clearly for the user. At the same time, the user has the option of continuously refining the evaluation or delving deeper into the background of the key figures. As a rule, BI solutions consist of so-called dashboards, i.e. overviews, which always provide a clear overview of current significant developments in the company’s own business.
This means that Business Intelligence offers extended evaluations and overviews of your daily business – lots of core information that you can see at a glance, but with plenty of opportunities to check and analyze it in depth.
Development of Business Intelligence at JTL
At JTL, we are always working on a range of solutions. Depending on the product, some development projects take place in the respective development team – for example JTL-Shop, JTL-eazyAuction or JTL-WMS – while others are based on expert teams in JTL-Wawi development. JTL-BI is one of the former, and last year we brought in new specialists specifically for this purpose. One of them, Andreas Christoffel, who played a key role in shaping the project, has his say below.
JTL: Hello Andreas, JTL is now also doing BI. How did this come about?
AC: More comprehensive evaluations and a better business overview are long-cherished wishes of many JTL customers. Especially due to the constant growth of the customers themselves, the desire is increasing more and more. It’s about giving Managing Directors a better overview of the current development of their business, but at the same time allowing them to analyze changes down to the last detail. JTL is familiar with this fundamental problem itself; it is a natural development of growing companies.
Once JTL had decided on a BI solution, it was necessary to create expertise for this within the company. This is how our small team of developers came about, which can look back on several years of experience in the development of comprehensive BI solutions and with the JTL product cosmos.
JTL: So the project is in good hands with you. Since the beginning of January, you’ve been working with great enthusiasm on this new extension for JTL-Wawi & Co. What has already been implemented?
AC: A high-performance BI solution cannot work on the database of an ERP system. Different rules apply here for data storage, so we have to create our own database (structure). Like an online store, this receives the data from the ERP through regular comparisons. The database is used to optimize the data for maximum evaluation speed. We then carry out standard evaluations on this database. We then present the evaluations in a separate user interface using browser-compatible navigation.
Data preparation in the background is already in full development – we are already synchronizing numerous master data. We have set up a BI test database by hand in order to implement the first evaluations. We will be adding numerous reports to this in the coming weeks. Work on the user interface is also underway – some optimizations and adjustments are still pending.
JTL: How does JTL-BI differ from the statistics contained in ERP?
AC: The statistics in JTL-Wawi focus on individual key figures. However, they do not place them in an analysis context in the sense of a system that supports the strategic decisions of a Managing Director, Logistics Manager or Assortment Manager. The BI system compiles information in such a way that a decision-maker in the company can derive a need for action from it. It is less a question of making the status at the packing station visible to the second. Rather, it is about recognizing trend developments, which parts of the product range are performing poorly and therefore making little contribution to the company’s results.
JTL: What’s next for you? And what are the biggest challenges that lie ahead for you?
AC: When converting the data from the individual JTL products, we have to take special cases into account, such as variation combinations, parts lists or configuration items. This also involves internal changes to the products, which are based on innovations and additional functions in new product versions. After all, JTL-BI should remain compatible with different program versions. Two tasks are therefore at the top of our list for the coming period: On the one hand, the automatic daily preparation of data from the ERP in the BI system, and on the other hand, the development of further standard evaluations in the specialist subject groups of sales, assortment, inventory, procurement and logistics. At the same time, however, we must not lose sight of the development of further company key figures.
The bottom line is that a basic framework for JTL-BI is already in place. The interaction with the various products and different versions will certainly be the biggest challenge for us.
Project time frame for JTL-BI
As you can see from Andreas’ answers, the development team is making a lot of progress. So much so, in fact, that we were able to see the first rudimentary version of it in internal use at the end of January. However, a full release, which has also undergone several internal and external tests, understandably requires a little more time. A well thought-out interaction between JTL-BI and our other products is particularly important to us, as is the retrieval of meaningful company key figures. However, we expect to present the solution live in a demonstration at JTL Connect in August. We also want to make it available to the first pilot customers at that time.
JTL-BI in a usable version, whether as a test or even as a release version, is therefore not far off. In fact, we have a number of large and exciting projects in the works – even outside of our core products such as JTL-Wawi and JTL-Shop – but we will be happy to tell you more about all of them later this year. In our review of the JTL-Partner Convention, for example, we will tell you more about JTL-POS in the coming days. We will also keep you up to date on JTL-BI in further articles.
