BLOG
05 March 2020

BI Benefits: You Can’t Afford to Neglect Your Data

business

Business intelligence (BI) benefits offer a better and more productive future.

Imagine completely controlling runaway expenses by making educated calculations of inventory stock. Or imagine you could understand your customers better than ever before. BI tools make for the best possible choice in ensuring this happens.

For more details on what are BI tools, I invite you to read Martin Birk’s article, Examples of BI Tools. This examines the types of BI tools on the market.

As a quick recap, BI implementation empowers your company with:

  • Reporting of KPIs
  • Decision Support
  • Ad Hoc Analytics
  • Performance Analysis
  • Predictive Analytics
  • Prescriptive Analytics

In case you were wondering, what could be the outcome of this kind of powerful instrument? In short, the primary advantages of business intelligence are working smarter, not harder. Your organisation already has huge amounts of data. By leveraging it, your operations will jump ahead in almost every measurable way.

What are the Biggest BI Benefits?

I will share with you some of the significant advantages of BI tools. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Gain Valuable Insights into Business Operations

A grand window with a view into the bigger picture. That’s one such way of describing the benefits of BI.

By enabling this technology, management can generate detailed operational reports for your organisation. Create reports highlighting expenses, customer interactions and insights as well as functional details. These can cover areas such as production, supply chain, and more.

Reports can refer to standard KPIs, which are understandable by even the unfamiliar. Of course, many operations can be conditional, requiring a more surgical approach. Managers can also generate reports based on unique, organisation specific KPIs.

2. Boost Revenues & Reduce Expenditures

With knowledge, comes decisive action. An organisation aware of the need for improvement can streamline operations, so management can identify inefficient processes and make relevant fixes.

Additionally, users can also recognise processes and activities demonstrating potential. With this insight, managers can decide to assign resources towards identified areas.

Predictive analytics can also help identify promising opportunities. One such way is through global forecasting. Another is trends analysis to foresee demand growth periods.

3. Guaranteed Informed Decision Making

Business Intelligence tools have a very notable takeaway – eliminating guesswork. With a greater perspective, management can carry out business decisions with confidence.

Industry know-how and years’ experience will always prevail. But, BI tools provide a new data-driven and proven approaches to making assessments. In this aspect, managers shouldn’t need to revert to ‘gut feelings’, at least not to such a degree.

4. Stay up to Date with Well-Presented Information

Generating reports is one aspect. But not every manager or stakeholder will comprehend individual clusters of information. BI tools help visualise information through intuitive representations. The best examples of these are graphs, charts, and dashboards.

Presentations must also consider their levels of accessibility. Using modern tools, authorised users can access information via desktop and mobile device. The best solutions should always be cloud-based, so users can enjoy access from anywhere in the world.

5. See the Biggest-Picture, with Data Analytics

At any given point, your organisation will yield considerable quantities of data. This includes equipment, personnel, and processes all producing datasets. Tools and processes can leverage this data through data mining or ad-hoc analytics. This consists of the collection, storing, organising, analysing, and presenting the data.

With this kind of tool, you’re able to seek out patterns and identify correlations, so you make the necessary adjustments to specific processes.

As an example: you can identify demand spikes during certain calendar days. But this can depend on whether goods retail at a certain price point.

When assessing correlations in data, you stand to identify outliers. This helps recognise exceptions to general rules, or production anomalies. By understanding these factors, you can seek profitable opportunities and streamline operations.

6. Intelligent Benchmarking

Build and simulate any business scenario and assess your performance against it. Make ad-hoc assessments against select KPIs or prevailing trends. An advantage of business intelligence is comparing real operations with simulated predictions.

Utilising predictive analytics, you can foresee milestones. This way, you can set reasonable expectations and goals for future performance.

7. Instant Performance Management

Enjoy regular – even daily – insights into positive or negative performance. With this digital solution, you can track, manage, and put in place performance goals.

You can view performance metrics on any device and easy-to-access dashboards. This provides transparency and clarity at a moment’s notice.

8. ‘Always Be Closing’ with Sales Intelligence

BI implementation can also boost the power of sales decisions. Management can leverage data to install strategies in select niches. Ensure you gain a broader understanding of the market and customers.

This way, your business can concentrate on operational efforts. The focus could be specific geographical areas, and market segments, among other factors.

Well-presented graphics and dashboards help sales teams advocate your organisation to prospective clients. Such information is beneficial to have on-hand to support sales presentations.

9. Rapid BI Implementation

For some enterprises, initiation can take as little as one week. A customer can quickly begin with the setup of the environment, before commencing with generating reports. This is especially true if a customer already has an SQL Server, and source systems can easily export data.

10. Control HR Costs

Expertise is possible to find, at favourable rates. By seeking the services of a local freelancer, you face high premiums for the knowhow of such a system and you can’t be sure to get certified help. Offshoring and nearshoring are increasingly favourable options, allowing you to curtail your expenditure. Our BI consultants are experts within data modelling as well, a skill necessary for making well-functioning and correct reports.

Stay Ahead of the Competition

Business Intelligence is becoming the norm in business strategy. Without instant, comprehensive analytics – you risk failing your complete potential. This starts with real thorough knowledge.

That kind of knowledge is no hidden treasure. It’s a matter of harnessing the information all around us. Everything contributes to the grand machine that is your business. Tap into data from production equipment to product orders, to delivery metrics.

Today, optimisation is data-driven.

  • It relies on understanding and learning from the past.
  • You get a broader awareness of present events.
  • It too focuses on calculating for the future.

By improving your BI maturity level, your business will make calculated and intelligent decisions. This tool lets your company piece together a complete picture of its environment.

Assessing performance or customer data correlations helps identify and work toward unique KPIs. These enable performance improvements in unique criteria sets. Such is instrumental in helping your organisation optimise and gain a competitive edge. Understanding these points helps boost revenue but is also helpful in curtailing expenditure.

With this said, I hope I have made clear the advantages of BI tools. This is an unprecedented degree to which this technology can leverage performance data.

Markets now demand powerful insights and knowledge. With this, organisations can seek a decisive competitive advantage. After all, knowledge is profit.

Learn more about BI implementation services