We all know that modern businesses depend on analytics. Even if you are running a simple bakery, you need to get data about sales, supplies, resources, and the total income you get.
That seems simple, yet the number of indicators for analysis for bigger businesses can be counted in hundreds or even thousands. And a business owner or even the most talented analyst cannot effectively work with these figures manually.
At the same time, every hour matters when it comes to making solutions. Thus, you need to get relevant data constantly and analyze it instantly. That is why you need automated analytics tools.
For example, if you run a network of bakery stores, you need reports from each store to get relevant information timely. And if one of these stores sends you reports in a handwritten form you’ll need way more time to process them.
Therefore, you need to standardize data before analyzing it.
And even that is not the end. You may also need to make some decisions about the received data. And that is what will push your business further.
Do you know that there is an innovative approach to the whole data operating process? That is what we call Business Intelligence. Since the very beginning, the Big Data concept helped businesses. And today, its implementation can speed up, improve, and add accuracy to almost every business.
Let’s consider the main features and the most important benefits of BI for businesses. In this article, we use data and opinions provided by Avenga pros. That company works in the field of Business Intelligence solutions for businesses and has dozens of successful cases of the implementation of BI in its portfolio.
Table of Contents
The Concept of Business Intelligence
What is Business Intelligence? BI is instruments, solutions, systems, and automation concepts that serve to process data with multiple variables, formulas, and tasks. But BI offers not just a transparent analysis. Business Intelligence machine learning technologies help to provide forecasts based on the data they work with. They help crystallize predicted solutions and behaviour patterns to ease the whole decision-making process for businesses.
Saying briefly, Business Intelligence in its essence is an advanced analytical tool that offers decisions and forecasts along with overall data analysis.
Today, BI solutions are quite diverse. These can be software samples, SaaS products, or their combo as well.
Business Intelligence as an activity consists of several interconnected processes:
- data mining,
- analytical processing in real-time (online analytical processing),
- obtaining information from databases (querying),
- reporting.
Each of these processes brings results.
How BI Technologies and Methods Help Businesses
Companies are using BI to make informed decisions, cut costs, and find new business opportunities. BI is something more than a tool for obtaining information from enterprise accounting systems. CIOs use Business Intelligence to identify underperforming business processes that are ripe for redesign.
Using modern business analysis tools, businessmen can start analyzing data on their own and not wait for the IT department to generate complex and confusing reports.
This democratization of access to information enables users to back up their business decisions with real numbers that would otherwise be based on intuition and chance.
Today, Business Intelligence methods are widely adopted among businesses, in which the key features are the following:
- The need to quickly respond to market changes, predict new trends and adapt the entire system to them.
- The presence of many departments provides data for analysis.
- Building multifactor strategies for the near and long term.
- Constant building of communication with customers and analysis of customer service to stay ahead of competitors.
To give a couple of simple examples, Business Intelligence methods are most widely used in retail chains, HoReCa networks, companies providing digital services to customers, FinTech companies, and the investment sector. But this does not mean that other businesses do not need BI. It is important to simply define the tasks and ways to implement this concept in order to get high results.
Main Ideas on How to Implement BI in Businesses
When you decide to implement BI concepts in your business, there are several rules you should adhere to when you want to gain predictable and high results.
1. Before implementing a BI system, companies should analyze the mechanisms for making managerial decisions and understand what information managers need to make more informed and faster decisions.
2. It is desirable to analyze in what form managers prefer to receive information (as reports, graphs, online, in paper form).
3. Remember that Business Intelligence gives more than data and its analysis. It gives contexts to the reported data i.e., shows causes of sales decrease on a certain period, or highlights what impact ROI, KPI, and other coefficients.
As BI changes the whole approach to decision-making and management, it impacts all the processes in the company. And your staff should be prepared for these changes so as not to slow down the process and not to sabotage it. Everything else can be done by specialists from Avenga.
