Our Business Intelligence systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, f inancial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include business performance management. Information is often gathered about other companies in the same industry, which is known as benchmarking.