In today’s competitive world, every business’s goal is to achieve better decisions faster. Business Intelligence (BI) delivers relevant and reliable information to the right people at the right time. More precisely, BI is a technology-driven process used to analyze data and present actionable information to help end-users make informed business decisions.

BI includes various tools, applications, and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources. This data is then prepared for analysis based on which reports are created, and dashboards & data visualizations are used to make the analytical reports available to corporate decision-makers and operational workers.

What are the Benefits of Business Intelligence?

BI offers endless benefits to any and every business. The rich visualization capabilities provided by BI tools allow companies to monitor sales, logistics, and even productivity. The richly visualized intuitive reports make it easy to carry out extensive data analysis in a short time frame.

Business Intelligence services help you better understand your business’ strengths and weaknesses while providing actionable insights into essential metrics and KPI’s. BI tools help in ensuring the competitiveness and profitability of your business.

Do I have enough data for using business intelligence? 

Most businesses collect and analyze data on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and maybe even daily basis. This data could be from their internal systems and even external sources.

BI takes this entire data to another level by providing centralized visual data dashboards that connect all the internal and external data sources to offer a complete business picture.

With a clear, complete view of the data, business decisions can become data-driven as the users can take a full look at what’s been happening in the past and present. BI also enables future forecasting, which helps create the right business strategies.

To further understand this, let’s take a look at how four different business segment can achieve everyday goals with BI:

Finance: Businesses set financial benchmarks for themselves that they want to achieve throughout the year. A lot of time is spent in compiling financial data each month from various sources into a spreadsheet. Business Intelligence offers a quicker and more optimized way to do this. BI solution centralizes all the financial data into one view, which vastly reduces the time spent collecting and analyzing the data. BI dashboards make it easy to gain a real-time overview of the company’s financial performance while also enabling users to nose-dive into the granular details to identify expense outliers and detect other anomalies.

Marketing: Business Intelligence can reduce the time it takes to analyze data manually by up to 90%. With BI, even small marketing teams gain the ability to identify insights and opportunities across large sets of data from multiple platforms within minutes instead of hours.

BI makes it possible to gain comprehensive insights that serve as a company’s marketing roadmap through data collection and connection. These insights are then used to develop various marketing tactics, such as

• Enhance cross-functional marketing strategies
• Intuitive search engine optimization
• Paid search optimization
• Advanced competitor audience analysis
• Geographical engagement analysis

Human Resources: Human resources departments fulfill several essential functions within a company, such as hiring, training, and the not-so-pleasant business of firing. The multifaceted functionalities of the HR department demand a unique solution.

Business Intelligence provides an advantage with HR data as well. It enables the collaboration of multiple data sets to enable better analytics. For example, Applicant Tracking System and performance management systems are usually kept separate. This usually prevents the department from identifying which hires perform best. Business intelligence tools help combine the data from these two systems to analyze better which hires perform the best. This can be further used to aggregate, visualize, research, and create a much more efficient hiring strategy.

Supply Chain Management: Business Intelligence is of immense use in supply chain management. It can be put to use for simple to much more complex analysis. To start with, BI can categorize supply chain costs at a more granular level and can be used to further drill down into the supply chain processes and drive out even the smallest inefficiencies. Most BI tools include industry-standard transportation metrics such as tender, acceptance, delivery performance, volume, cost, trends, service levels, length of haul, cube per load, and weight per shipment. All the data is presented in comprehensive, easy-to-understand formats, which makes analysis quick and efficient.

Insight is probably the best word to describe the potential of business intelligence. By providing insight into each department’s inner workings through specific, detailed, and actionable information, BI enables businesses to make strategic decisions that result in higher efficiencies, cost savings, and overall performance improvements. Reach out today to find out how your business can utilize BI to be more successful.