What is business intelligence?
Nowadays, organizations can quickly uncover actionable insights to make strategic decisions; Business Intelligence (BI) helps them analyze historical and current data. Business intelligence tools make this possible by processing large data sets across multiple sources and presenting results in visual formats that are easy to understand and share.
How business intelligence works?
BI takes four basic steps to transform raw data into easy-to-understand insights for everyone within the organization to use. The first three steps – data collection, analysis, and visualization – pave the way for the final decision-making step.
Before using BI, companies had to do a lot of their analysis manually, but BI tools automate many processes and save companies time and effort.
Step 1: Collect and transform data from multiple sources
Business intelligence tools typically use the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) method to aggregate structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. Then this data is transformed and reconfigured before it is stored in a central location so that applications can efficiently analyze and query it as a single comprehensive data set.
Step 2: Uncover trends and contradictions
Data collection, data discovery, or automation is typically used to quickly analyze data to find patterns and outliers that provide insight into the current state of the business. Business intelligence tools often feature several types of data modeling and analytics—including exploratory, descriptive, statistical, and predictive—that further explore data and predict trends and manufacturer recommendations.
Step 3: Use data visualizations to present results
Business intelligence reports use data visualizations to understand and share results easily. Reporting methods include interactive data dashboards, charts, graphs, and maps that help users see what’s going on in the business right now.
Step 4: Act on real-time insights
Viewing current and historical data in the context of business activities gives companies the ability to move from insights into reality quickly. Business intelligence enables real-time adjustments and long-term strategic changes that eliminate inefficiencies, adapt to market shifts, correct supply issues, and resolve customer issues.
Why Companies Benefit from Using Business Intelligence Tools?
Because business intelligence tools speed up information analysis and performance assessment, they are valuable in helping companies reduce inefficiencies, report potential problems, find new revenue streams, and identify areas for future growth.
Some of the specific benefits that businesses experience when using business intelligence include:
- Increase the efficiency of operational processes.
- Insight into customer behavior and shopping patterns.
- Accurate tracking of sales, marketing, and financial performance.
- Clear criteria based on historical and current data.
- Instant alerts about data anomalies and customer issues.
- Share Analytics in real-time across departments.
Heretofore, business intelligence tools were mainly used by data analysts and IT users. Nowadays, self-service BI platforms are available to everyone, from CEOs to operations teams.
Here’s how Business Intelligence improves the way business is done in six key areas:
-Customer Experience
Access all your customer information in one place, so you can direct resources to main areas that will positively impact customer engagement and support.
-Sales and marketing
Gain insight into sales and marketing performance, consumer behavior, and purchasing trends that ensures future marketing initiatives are effective and drive revenue.
-Processes
Optimize processes by automating routine analytics tasks, improving processes, reducing inefficiencies, and increasing productivity.
-Finance
Use custom dashboards to get a comprehensive view of a company’s financial health, study data’s history, calculate risks, and anticipate trends.
-Stock control
Automate data analysis and reporting to improve inventory management, speed up fulfillment, and help anticipate purchasing trends.
-Security and Compliance
Centralize data to improve accuracy and transparency, making it easier to detect errors and security issues and reducing compliance risks.
When evaluating business intelligence tools, look for a safe, compatible, globally available, and reliable product. It should also have features that make BI insights accessible to your entire organization—such as data visualizations, shared dashboards, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Power BI development is another one-of-a-kind service that Xeetek offers. Following a gap analysis session in which we define the gaps required for better reporting and data analysis, we are able to develop scorecards, dashboards, and advanced reports that best meet the needs of top management.
Original Source: Teknologiia team