Executive Support System(Executive Information System)

Scenario

How do you make business decisions?

Scenario

If you’re like most executives, then you probably have one of those enormous Excel spreadsheets, a dozen tabs wide, with data from various departments.

Scenario• It is painstaking to build and update a spreadsheet

with figures from every department of your organization.

• The data always needs to fit together nicely and there is a high risk for human error.

• Even if all the numbers are keyed in correctly, when analyzing the data, the sharpest CEO will often miss a reoccurring pattern or red flag amongst their KPIs.

• The opportunity costs of this kind of manual process are also staggering.

• Crunching numbers in spreadsheets leaves executives, or the staff developing these reports, with very little time and energy to then analyze that data and create forecasts that positively influence business decisions.

Definition

• ESS is also known as Executive Information System (EIS).

• An Executive Support System (ESS) is software that allows users to transform enterprise data into quickly accessible and executive-level reports, such as those used by billing, accounting and staffing departments. An ESS enhances decision making for executives.

Components

Hardware Software

User InterfaceTelecommunication

Architecture of ESS

Where is ESS?

Range of ESSESS mainly deals with data related to key departments like billing, accounting, scheduling, staffing etc. In addition to providing quick access to the data, ESS also acts as an analysis tool and provides good understanding of the various possible outcomes depending upon the changes in input data.

Range(Cont’d)

ESS thus saves valuable time of the executives in digging the huge pile of information to identify the critical data and helps them spend more time on brainstorming and decision making by providing only the required data. ESS can be used to view and analyse both the present data and predicted future data.

(Range)Cont’d

ESS can be customized to suite the user requirements and its functioning is solely dependent on the skills of the developer.

Features• Contemporary ESS bring together data from all parts of the firm and enable managers to select, access, and tailor them as needed using easy-to-use desktop analytical tools and online data displays.

• Through their ESS, many managers have access to public data, such as news services, financial market databases, and economic information.

• ESS has the ability to drill down, moving from a piece of summary data to lower and lower levels of detail.

• Well-designed ESS also has some facility for environmental scanning.

• A key information requirement of managers at the strategic level is the ability to detect signals of problems in the organizational environment that indicate strategic threats and opportunities.

• Ability to analyze, compares, and highlight trends.

Features()Cont’d

Advantages

• Improved personal efficiency• Increased organizational control

• Competitive advantage over competitors

• Automation of the managerial processes.

If there is no ESS/EIS?Without ESS: A Re-Active Business Decision• A CEO receives a call from an online advertising company offering an incredible rate on pay-per-click ads, but for a limited time.

• Now it’s up to the CEO to quickly figure out which products will yield the most return on the advertising investment.

• First the executive logs into an online advertising dashboard to compare costs, response rates and return from previous campaigns.

• Then he gets on the phone with a warehouse account manager, or logs into an inventory management database.

• From the warehouse, he finds out the cost to ship each product, the list price of each product and which products have been sitting on the shelves the longest or accruing the most storage fees.

• With all of this data and information in place, the executive can figure out which product will likely yield the highest return and finally respond to the advertising offer before the deadline expires.

If there is no ESS/EIS?

What will happen when we use ESS/EIS inside an organization?

With ESS: A Pro-Active Business Decision• The ESS sends an alert to the company CEO that product

“X” was stored for “X” number of days, or that the warehouse storage costs for product “X” have exceeded a certain total dollar amount.

• Working from that report, the executive alerts his sales and marketing employees to research the most cost-effective ways to move product “X” off the shelves.

• Here the CEO is not scrambling to reply to an outside call from an advertising company

• The ESS alert put him in the driver’s seat and gave the sales and marketing team lead time to find the best

Screenshots

Screenshots(Cont’d)

Future of ESS• Toolbox for customized systems• Multimedia support• Better access (via PDFs and cell phones)• Virtual Reality and 3-D Image Displays• Merging of analytical systems (OLAP /

multidimensional analysis)) with desktop publishing• Client/server architecture• Web-enabled EIS• Automated support and intelligent assistance• Integration of EIS and Group Support Systems• Global EIS• Integration and deployment with ERP products

Summary

• Executive Support Systems meet the needs of corporate executives by providing them with vast amounts of Information quickly and in graphical form to help them make effective decisions.

 • ESS must be flexible, easy to use, and contain both internal and external sources of information.