Overview

Organisations know the value of Business Intelligence (BI) in monitoring sales performance, analysing the quality of manufacturing processes or customer service and tracking financial indicators. How many, however, are leveraging this technology to assess the corporate risk associated with the tough capital investment decisions now required across an organisation's asset estate?

With the economic outlook becoming more pessimistic by the moment, senior managers can be prone to rewriting investment strategies and business plans whilst under pressure to make rapid changes. There are, of course, huge risks associated with such decisions - from escalating maintenance costs to business damaging equipment downtime. Irrespective of financial conditions, organisations cannot risk making hasty changes to capital investment strategies; as Karen Conneely, Group Commercial Manager at Real Asset Management, explains, it is the use of BI to pull together information from fixed asset registers, maintenance systems and finance that will deliver the trusted, real time information required to identify opportunities for asset savings and, critically, predict the risk/reward associated with reining in investment today.