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In our digital transformation competitive age, every professional has to manage data effectively in their area. By utilizing modern business intelligence tools, organizations can not only gain a comprehensive overview of data but also have access to the various touch points necessary for successful operations and strategic activities.
This article will begin by explaining what BI solutions are, then continue to the benefits that businesses can get from them.
We'll describe and show examples of business intelligence solutions by industry, business function, and department that you can use in your organization. We will then summarize our findings and conclude this article to help you build your own BI solution and upgrade your business goals.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Users can perform self-service analyses without needing to have a deep understanding of technical terms. Many tools offer advanced features, such as SQL mode and calculated fields.
These are available to satisfy the needs of advanced users. Business intelligence solutions are not limited to a particular industry, platform, or function.
They can save countless hours and relieve professionals and leaders from the tedious and repetitive task of exporting multiple spreadsheets with data that is now lost.
Let's look at these benefits in greater detail.
Business intelligence (BI), also known as business strategy analytics, is software that allows users to view data in a user-friendly format, such as charts, graphs, and dashboards.
Business users can access various types of data using BI tools, including historical and current data, data from third parties, and data collected in-house. They can also access semi-structured and unstructured information, such as social media. This information can be analyzed by users to gain insight into the performance of their business.
Business intelligence is not a tool that tells users what they should do or what will happen if a particular course of action is taken.
It also does more than just generate reports. BI is a tool that allows people to analyze data to gain insights and understand trends. Business intelligence and data analytics can help organizations improve their business unit decisions, identify issues or problems, detect market trends, and discover new revenue opportunities.
How Does Business Intelligence Work?
BI platforms rely traditionally on data warehouses to provide their base information. Data warehouses aggregate data from different data sources to create a central system that supports business analytics and reporting.
Business intelligence software queries a warehouse and displays the results in reports, charts, and maps. A data warehouse can have an OLAP engine that supports multidimensional queries.
A business intelligence architecture is more than just BI. Business intelligence data can be stored in either a large data warehouse for the entire organization or smaller data marts for specific departments and units.
These data marts are often linked to an enterprise data store. Data lakes built on Hadoop clusters and other extensive data systems are also increasingly being used to store BI and Analytics data.
This is especially true for log files and sensor data.
Data for BI can be historical and include real-time information gathered directly from the source system. This allows BI tools to support strategic and tactical decision-making processes.
Raw data from various source systems must be combined, consolidated, and cleaned before it can be used in BI tools. This is to ensure that BI users and teams are analyzing accurate, consistent data.
BI tools used to be used mainly in the past by BI professionals and IT specialists who produced dashboards, reports, and queries for business users.
Business requirements analysts, executives, and employees are increasingly using business intelligence platforms, thanks to self-service data discovery and BI tools. Self-service environments for business intelligence enable users to create dashboards, visualize data and query BI data on their own.
Data mining, predictive analytics, and text mining are all forms of advanced analytics that BI programs incorporate.
Predictive modeling is a typical example, which allows for what-if analyses of different business scenarios. Most often, however, advanced analytics are carried out by teams that include data scientists, statisticians, and predictive modelers, as well as other analytics professionals.
BI teams, on the other hand, handle more basic queries and analyses of business opportunity data.
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Why Business Intelligence is Important
Business intelligence's role is to help an organization improve its business operations by using relevant data. Businesses that use BI techniques and tools effectively can transform their data into valuable insights into their BI strategy and processes.
These insights can be used to improve business decisions, increasing productivity and revenue. This leads to increased profits and business growth.
Without BI, organizations cannot easily take advantage of data-driven decision-making. Executives and workers must instead rely on intuition, gut feeling, past experiences, accumulated knowledge, and other factors to make essential business decisions.
These methods may lead to good choices, but they are also prone to errors and mistakes due to the lack of data.
Business Intelligence Techniques
Business intelligence techniques that companies use include:
Data Mining
Data mining is a process that extracts information from different data sources and uses it for a variety of purposes.
Data mining is used in business intelligence to find patterns or correlations among the dozens of fields within a database.
Business intelligence software can be used to connect disparate sources of data, organize and collate the data and create reports and dashboards, which help businesses make better financial decisions.
Data mining is a five-step process that transforms raw data into useful information.
- ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load): This process involves the transfer of data from one or multiple sources, its transformation, and storage in a data store.
- Multidimensional databases, such as tabular cubicles, are used to store and manage data.
- Access: By standardizing, loading, and managing data in a database, business analysts and data scientists can access information.
- The application software analyzes and sorts data based on the queries that end users submit.
- Present: Charts, graphs, and reports help users to understand data after its analysis and sorting.
Data Visualization
Data visualization is the process of displaying data in a visually appealing format, such as a graph or map, to help the brain better understand it.
Visualizing data helps users identify trends and patterns. Dashboards and infographics are two of the most common forms of data visualization. They help computers to receive important BI reports and can be customized to suit different teams.
Questioning
Information is requested by database queries. Users of BI can query data sources that are provided by their tech teams.
BI tools allow companies to query and connect to data repositories. Businesses can easily create dashboards and visualizations using these tools. Users of more advanced BI software can customize the query or specify a query language.
Well-written questions make it easy to get accurate and relevant data that helps you make better business decisions.
Descriptive Analysis
The majority of companies use descriptive analytics for data analysis. The purpose of descriptive analytics, which is also known as data summaries or summary analysis, is to simplify and summarize raw data.
Business intelligence is usually started with descriptive analytics. This results in visualizations like pie charts and line graphs.
Organizations can monitor and track trends using descriptive analytics. Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the growth of sales percent over a year, inventory tracking, and revenue per client, are examples of descriptive analytics.
The products of descriptive analysis include dashboards, reports, and presentations.
Benefits of BI
Each business shares the same objective: to turn data into actionable insight and exceed established metrics. This will help every business to achieve sustainable growth and increase revenue while saving time.
These are the top benefits you can use to answer any business questions you may have.
Implementation In Any Department Or Industry
Business executives or managers may need to access data from across the organization, such as marketing and sales.
This will allow them to make better decisions. A business intelligence solution can be implemented in any industry or function and with any data source. This means you can get a complete overview by implementing the best BI tool for your specific business case.
There are BI software solutions available today that can be used by any department, whether you work in marketing, sales, or customer service.
When looking for the best BI software to suit your needs, it's essential to consider the different departments involved. This will ensure that all departmental requirements are met and that you don't require additional BI or analytics solutions.
This will allow you to save money and choose a provider of business intelligence solutions that meets all your requirements.
It is not uncommon for departments to work in isolation and lack communication channels that would allow them to understand a business story more thoroughly.
Business managers may need to ask for numerous reports from different stakeholders to form their own opinions and make recommendations. Financial departments need to have a bird's-eye view of all costs. However, finding the correct information and updating metrics and data, as well as constantly double-checking and updating the cost and relevant metrics, can be a nightmare.
These situations can often cause business processes to slow down, and an entire company can suffer. To avoid future cost increases or bottlenecks, it's essential to check and choose the best solution.
We will show you real-world examples of BI software in different industries and functions later on.
A Data Analyst's Tool For Business Users
Modern self-service BI offers options for data analysts and advanced data scientists. It is crucial to have tools that can capture the different business models, allowing all employees, regardless of their background, to create and understand a data narrative, which may be visualized on an online dashboard.
Understanding the role of a data analyst or connecting them with a manager will only lead to positive outcomes because every employee can consolidate all their data in one place through software and can access any information that they may need to perform their task more efficiently.
Business intelligence is a tool that provides intelligent, innovative solutions to teams. It increases the interoperability of data and allows for a seamless user experience, resulting in the best possible data management and business results.
You can analyze information using a user-friendly interface by connecting your data source.
Or you can switch to the advanced SQL mode. By using a drag-and-drop UI, any user can do a deep analysis and then share the results with colleagues or stakeholders.
This allows everyone to have access to the data, and the result is a simple dashboard or report.
Includes Artificial Intelligence And Predictive Analytics
We all know that managing large amounts of data every day has become a significant challenge. Innovative BI solutions automate and perform analyses of large datasets, allowing users to concentrate on what matters: actionable insight.
The traditional methods of gathering and analyzing information, such as spreadsheets, no longer add value. Instead, they cause organizations to spend more time and money than expected.
The amount of data is too complex to be analyzed, and companies are forced to use modern business intelligence systems that offer AI and predictive analytics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Modern, artificially intelligent software such as smart alarms uses neural networks and historical information to notify users when a business anomaly happens.
They can then control the data without having to do manual calculations.
Predictive Analytics: These solutions use predictive analytics to save time and predict the future of the company.
They also provide a roadmap for where and how the data will behave. Knowing the future, and preparing for it, should be a key element in the decision-making process.
Access Data Anywhere And At Any Time With Real-Time Monitoring
By using BI, you can automate many tedious and standard processes like exporting spreadsheets. You can do this by creating interactive charts with dashboards that can be adjusted.
These dashboards allow users to access real-time data and are updated automatically. They also have an interactive nature that will enable them to click on any part of the dashboard and explore it further.
It is made possible by some features, such as chart filters, drill-downs, and tooltips. It is no longer necessary to wait on a report from the IT department.
The software interface allows you to do this in a matter of seconds. Anyone can now see their department's or company's performance without having to wait, and they don't have to rely on historical data to do the analysis.
This benefit allows companies to spend less time creating and generating reports. Still, most importantly, it gives them access to the information they need whenever they want.
Understanding Business Operations
Business intelligence can help companies better understand their customers by analyzing insights from users and patterns of buying.
Segmentation can be used to improve the user experience and product offerings. BI is, therefore, beneficial for the business as well as its users.
Competitive Advantage
Businesses can gain a competitive edge by using business intelligence platforms to learn what their competition is doing.
Monitoring internal systems allows companies to stay ahead of their competitors. Budgeting, planning, and forecasting are all powerful tools for businesses that can keep them competitive. Businesses can also learn to differentiate their products and services from those of competitors by monitoring the sales and marketing results.
Transform Data Into Action
Business intelligence tools help organizations improve their decision-making by predicting future trends and patterns.
BI tools can be used by companies to analyze data from their websites and other sources and identify trends that they can use for marketing strategies. This type of analysis helps enterprises better understand their processes. They can use the information to identify new directions for a better future.
The correct information is essential for companies, but it's not the only thing.
Read More: Role of Business Intelligence in Marketing and its Benefits
Use Of Business Intelligence Solutions
Business intelligence solutions can be applied to any business or industry. Each department, whether you are in sales, marketing, or procurement, must be performing well to create business value over time.
We have collected some of the most critical functions that a company uses and presented you with real-world BI dashboard examples to inspire you as you search for the best solution.
Human Resources (HR)
Human resources is one of the main functions of any organization today. The amount of applications, recruitment, workforce management, and analysis of employees has increased to the point that manual screening and optimization processes are no longer feasible.
The success of any company depends on keeping the "human" aspect healthy and productive while also welcoming the best candidates to the advertised position. This will allow them to have a clear view of the current state of human resources. An HR dashboard can be an excellent solution for all business needs related to human resource management.
The dashboard is based on the performance of employees over a certain period. We all know that employees are at the heart of every business, and if their performance is not up to par, something is wrong with management.
Metrics like absenteeism and overall labor efficiency, categorized by department and structured over five years, can help you understand how well your employees perform and whether they are satisfied with their workplace. If you have any concerns about the metrics, then it's time to schedule meetings and focus on improving people management.
Procurement
Procurement is a department that most companies have. It has its own set of best practices for success. Modern procurement dashboards with intelligent features can automate, predict and monitor the entire procurement cycle and management of suppliers.
To compete in today's competitive business environment, businesses must be able to deliver the best strategies possible to meet the needs of the organization and its contractors.
To ensure stable growth and reduce costs, BI can be used to consolidate and enhance data management and unify it. If you look closely at the dashboard, you will see how the suppliers' structure affects the procurement process.
Each employee who wants to be the best will benefit from tracking relevant metrics, such as compliance rates, suppliers, and purchase order cycle times, among other things.
This type of overview, with real-time data and clear visuals, as well as interactivity, that no static spreadsheet offers, will have a beneficial impact on performance, future negotiation, and strategies.
Sales
In today's market, no company can survive without a department of sales that has a lot of complex processes and strategies that are constantly changing.
Even experienced professionals can find it challenging to combine sales operations, CRM, prospects, and performance monitoring in a single view. Data is often scattered across different systems, and the only way of connecting them is via traditional spreadsheets.
Modern times demand modern solutions. BI takes on this challenging function and provides solutions to each sales professional. One of the critical components of these solutions is a professional sales dashboard:
A comprehensive overview of all metrics, combined with an interactive view, allows you to focus on the data that is most relevant to your specific sales scenario.
We have included KPIs in our dashboard that are important to C-level executives and Vice Presidents. The high-level metrics, such as revenue, cross-sell and upsell rates, and incremental sales, provide an overview of the strategies that are defined at a departmental level.
The sales pipeline will work more efficiently by connecting the data sources needed. This will bring in new revenue. By visualizing the growth of each department, executives can look deeper into which metrics didn't work well in the previous years.
They can also refresh data in real-time and take action before bottlenecks arise.
Marketing
No matter whether it is done internally or by an agency, marketing is an essential part of any company. The marketing department must be updated regularly, and numerous reports should be sent out on a regular schedule.
Strategic initiatives also need to have a detailed and transparent discussion. The company will know what to expect, the agency will be able to meet tight deadlines, and professionals will save a lot of time.
A simple marketing dashboard can provide a wealth of information.
The dashboard is based on the metrics of CMOs that are discussed by companies during strategic planning for marketing initiatives.
Sometimes, large volumes of data simply cannot be managed by traditional reporting methods or data presentation. This dashboard displays high-level metrics, such as cost per lead, MQL, and SQL, along with net incomes for each.
You can quickly see where your department is in relation to the previous months and make adjustments if necessary.
The dashboard can be automated, so CMOs do not have to spend hours compiling reports every time they want to analyze marketing progress or attend a meeting.
Customer Service
Customers are known to be the critical factor in determining whether or not a business is booming. Assisting customers with their issues is an integral part of a client's journey.
Good support services can encourage customers to return and recommend your brand. In contrast, a poor service experience can harm your company's reputation.
Implementing a business intelligence tool to optimize your department of customer service can be very beneficial.
It will allow you to perform detailed analysis on aspects like your team's performance, call center metrics, and customer behavior, among other things. You will be able to optimize your customer service processes and offer a superior experience to customers.
What Is The Difference Between Traditional BI And Modern BI?
Business intelligence tools have historically been based on the traditional business intelligence model. It was a top-down approach, where the IT organization was driving business intelligence, and static reports were used to answer most, if not all, analytical questions.
If someone wanted to ask a question about an account, they had to wait until the end of the queue to get their request. The result was a slow and frustrating reporting cycle, where people were unable to use current data for making decisions.
Business intelligence, as it is known today, is used to answer static queries and provide regular reports. Modern business intelligence, however, is interactive and accessible.
Multiple users can customize dashboards and create accounts with little notice. IT departments still play a crucial role in managing data access. Users can visualize data with the right software and answer their questions.
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Conclusion
These benefits will help you understand the value of business intelligence software and how it can benefit your company.
It is a great way to automate manual tasks, which slow down operations, regardless of the department or industry. Next, we'll look at business intelligence in terms of sectors and functions and provide more details on each.
You have been given examples of BI solutions that you can implement immediately in your company. We also explained the benefits each model provides.
Modern BI can be implemented in your company, and you will see immediate results. It is not just the technical team that can benefit from the ability to use interactive visuals to highlight data or to schedule automated reports to save hours, but also the average business person who needs to tell their own story with modern software.
