How to use Business Intelligence

Organizations have questions to answer and goals to maintain the performance level. Raw data is gathered from the business’s performance by the organization, and then the data is analyzed and kept in the data warehouse. This process is called Business Intelligence.

BI Systems Consists of Four Parts

• Company information is stored from the various sources of a data warehouse in a cluster and available location.
• Business management tools excavate and process data in the warehouse.
• Business performance management (BPM) tools examine and check the business target’s advancement.
• An interactive dashboard combined with data visualization reporting tools offers quick accessibility of the information.

Where is Business Intelligence Used?

• Data Scientist and Analysts

Analysts use BI power tools. They use the company’s centralized data combined with dominant analytic tools to be aware of the room for opportunities to improve and suggest strategic plans to company leadership.

• Finance

Users can have an idea upon which the decisions can be made and realize factors that affect the profit and loss of a business by combining financial data with operations, marketing, and sales data.

• Marketing

BI tools assist marketers to keep track of their campaign metrics from a central digital space. These data provide the marketing professionals with a more accurate view of the overall performance and give interpretative visuals to share with the others in the company.BI can offer campaign tracking in real-time, evaluate each performance and decide how to do future campaigns.

• Sales

Operation managers and sales data analysts use BI dashboards and key performance indicators (KPI). They use these tools to easily approach detailed information such as discount reviews, customer revenue, and customer lifetime value. Sales managers examine sales rep performance, profit targets, and sales reports in dashboards and data visualization.

• Operations

To bail out a few times, managers can acquire and examine data to find the solution to step up the process. Business Intelligence also must make sure that the goals of service level agreements are accomplished and help in increasing distribution directions.

What is the value of Business Intelligence?

The most significant feature of Business Intelligence is that it can offer decisions based on data. BI converts raw data into information. Based on this information, the organization can plan its further steps and take action to produce a positive impact. 

BI systems base their decision on past, present and favorable future data.

• Descriptive Analysis

This analysis comes in a theory form. After going through descriptive reports, the analysts disclose the present and past conditions available in dashboards, business reporting, data warehousing, and scorecards. The analysts would have a clear view of issues in the business and could find the chance to improve.

• Predictive Analysis

The analysts of these days make use of data excavation, machine learning, and predictive modeling to predict future events and evaluate the probability that something could happen.

• Prescriptive Analysis

This analysis explains why a specific action should be taken for certain things. It qualifies to increase simulation and decision modeling. It offers the best possible research to decide on appropriate business decisions and actions.

How do companies use Business Intelligence?

Companies extract information in different ways. They use this information to make crucial decisions. Below are a few ways companies collect information.

• Embedded BI

Embedded BI merges reports, dashboards, and analysis viewed into an application. Information is shown on the BI platform and implanted directly into the application’s user interface to ensure quality text and data usability. This combination provides the graphics and KPIs of BI within CRM, CMS, and PMS. Embedded BI can help in workflow automation depending on the parameters set by the users. This can be done without checking BI software. It saves some time and cost involved in producing reports and analyses.

• Self-Service Analytics

Self-Service Analytics permits end users to quickly evaluate their data by producing their reports and altering the present data. You do not need training for this. If any organization requires an annual report, they can hand over this task to any IT company. With these self-service analytics or ad hoc reports, users can produce reports quickly in no time. End users can evaluate their data by adjusting calculations. This workability reduces the load on the technical department. This act gives an advantage to the business users the power to control their analytical needs and withdraw maximum value from their data and application.

• Data Discovery

Data discovery includes gathering data from different databases and silos and merging them into a single source that can be analyzed quickly and in real-time. The users administer Data Discovery. It shows unknown or unusual patterns and values that can be discovered in data. It lets you become aware of the new trend as soon as it is introduced in the market.

• Augmented Analysis

These analytics provide data analysis automatically, with natural language processing and machine learning. This analysis can be manipulated, advanced, and presented to offer transparent results and easy reach to sophisticated tools to take business decisions every day. Users can go beyond any limit to have transparency and take perfect actions.

Augmented analytics reduces a company’s reliance on a data scientist through automation of knowledge using updated artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. It requires little or no guidance from a technician.

Case Studies: Practical Examples of Business Intelligence in the Workplaces

Data-driven decision-making analytics can give success. High global competition, customer expectations, and narrow profit margins use BI for a competitive advantage. These organizations can be of different sizes.

Baylis & Harding : BI Offers decision-making support

They are known as the wholesale distributor of world-class toiletries and gift sets. They are available in primary and unconventional stores.

Challenge: The company requires giving a clear insight into financial, customer and sales data to the managers and executives to take business decisions and expand the business if needed.

Solution: managers and executives applied business intelligence tools to produce standard and ad hoc reports.

Results: Managers and Company Executives now have an immediate approach to the business data, and they act upon the information they collect in no time. They produce dashboards reports with KPIs that apply to their area of concern. Then they give out clear goals and performances reports to everyone on their team.

Spear Education: BI makes both Internal Processes and Workflow efficient

Spear Education is the principal in making effective decisions for the world of dentists.

Challenge: Spear’s phone was not functionally updated, which could make its customer service reports more appropriate and efficient. Their phone system could not record calls and could not apply a customer relationship management tool (CRM). Its challenge is to offer better customer service.

Solution: After extensive research, Spear associated its call center software with its BI solution to keep more detailed customer communication records and produce complete customer service reports.

Results: Spear escalated agent efficiency by implementing the new solution and bailed out the company 35 hours per week. Spear agents now use saved time to allocate 4000 more outbound calls every week.

Conclusion

Business intelligence allows companies to analyze data to make more educated decisions. It is growing each year with more up-to-date technology. Various industries like the oil industry, insurance companies, and retail companies are adopting Business Intelligence for their company’s benefit. Choosing the right BI tool according to the requirement of your business is a decision worth taking. BI tools are powerful and provide modern capabilities. The optimum strategy often starts with a business intelligence program and then incorporates business analytics to make a forecast to improve efficiency and revenue generation.

FAQs

Q1. Can I afford a Business Intelligence solution as a small to medium-sized business?

Only large companies could access, visualize, model, and report the information for the business until a few years ago. But today, cloud technologies have brought down the cost of application of BI tools for which it became more available to small, medium companies. Microsoft’s powerful self-service BI tool, Power BI, provides every business with quality BI tools for upgraded analytics and decision support at no cost.

Q2. Will my business data be secure?

Securing data and accessing the data are critical objectives of IT systems. BI solution should go with the same high security, performance, and reliability expected from other systems in your organization. The esteemed BI solution supports the existing security infrastructure to keep all the data securely. 

For example, the Power BI service is Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure. The platform, built on Azure, employs Azure Active Directory (AAD) to secure the user identity and permission and restrict data access to only given users.

Q3. What is the difference between Business Intelligence software and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)?

BI solutions provide quality discussions to create a strategic business decision. These solutions can collect both strategic and operational data. The strategic data includes revenue, profit, and growth, while operational data includes daily sales performance. This provides business leaders to evaluate information to take the next step that meets the business objectives. BI offers strategic analytics.

An ERP system produces clear insights into an organization’s operational data, excluding trend analysis and data comparison. It offers transactional and operational analytics.

Q4. What is the process of implementing Business Intelligence software?   

An esteemed BI solution should provide your organization with a structured process. BI comprises sets of processes, technologies, and architectures required to extract meaningful information from raw data to make profitable decisions for an organization. They go through the following functions: design, shaping, modeling, and visualization.

One should keep in mind that the BI solution application is non-linear. A well-known approach like the circular process consists of simple starting, demanding assumptions, clear outcomes, rinse, and repeat. The outcome is a series of reports presented in dashboards or other forms. These reports are accessible and attractive.