Introduction As the business environment changes and becomes more complex, businesses are under enormous stress to respond and be innovative to such conditions. Business decision making needs to be quick and strategic and therefore making such decisions can be very complex. What this Business Intelligence (BI) report will describe are the tools available to the manager to support such decisions, the possible benefits and limitations of BI. (Turban et al., 2011)Turban et al., (2011, p. 28) describe business intelligence (BI) as “a generic term that combines architectures, tools, databases, analytical tools, applications and methodologies. It is a phrase without content, so it means different things to different people. The main objective of BI is to enable interactive access to data in real time, easy manipulation of data and the ability to manage it. be able to do appropriate data analysis. Managers are then able to make more accurate and relevant decisions using BI by reviewing old and new data. (Turban et al., 2011)Ultimately, Business Intelligence has the ability to simplify the way managers access and analyze data, making it easier to understand, collaborate and act on information at any time much simpler for decision-makers. (Microsoft, 2014)Turban et al., (2011, p. 30) state that “an enterprise system has four main components”.1. Data Warehouse2. Business Analysis3. Sales performance management4. User interfaceFigure 1: Overview of Business Intelligence (Turban et al., 2011, p.29)Data warehousingTurban et al., (2011, p. 52) describes a data warehouse as “a pool of data produced to support decision making; it is also a repository of current and historical data of potential interest to managers throughout the organization. Turban et al. (2011, p. 52) went on to state that “data are typically structured to be available in a form ready for analytical processing activities (i.e. data mining, querying, reporting and other supporting applications). To properly conduct business processes, it is important to use various tools such as BI tools and a combination of real-time data warehousing (RDW) with a decision support system (DSS). By having appropriate and reliable information on current trends, changes, etc., decision-makers are able to make better choices. Data warehousing has the ability to provide managers with crucial operational data in a reliable, timely and reliable manner. (Turban et al., 2011)Characteristics of data warehousing:• Subject oriented: for example, sales, who will only have meaningful information to support decision making.• Integrated• Time variant (time series) : data warehouses must take time into account because it is one of the most important dimensions