Foxfire! has been a powerful query and reporting tool for over 30 years. Business Intelligence wasn’t even a buzzword when Foxfire! was first introduced; yet there’s so much in Foxfire! that is all about BI.
Turning plain data into business information requires taking complex database structures and making them easier to understand. With respect due to Tigger, that’s what Foxfire! does best!
Often, businesses that implement business intelligence, think it’s sufficient to directly link to their data and then create graphs on it. That’s not business intelligence – that’s basic reporting.
Instead, it is critical to build user-friendly views, using field and table names that make sense to the person building the data. This is why there is a huge market for “Information Workers”, people who can take data and make it information.
And there are a lot of tools that work together. Foxfire! can act as the final BI tool, generating fantastic reports and charts, combining them into dashboards. But it can also act as the ETL, the data transformation tool that creates the data warehouse for other business tools, such as Microsoft’s PowerBI and Tableau files.
So what are the questions that need to be answered? If you can’t define the question clearly, then you’re not ready for BI tools. But you still need a tool to make it easier to find the data. This often happens years after a system is put into place. Until your business has collected data for a few years, you might not realize there’s a need for categorizing it a particular way. By that time, your developer is long gone and the people who understand the database may have already left. That’s why Foxfire! is a great tool for developers and businesses alike. Implement Foxfire! early on with your developer and then when they leave, you still have a strong business reporting tool ready to go.
If your developer is gone, find a consultant who knows the system or contact us for help. We have years of experience making sense of data, transforming databases into information resources and turning information into intelligence.