Introduction

In today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, it is essential to have a real-time bird’s eye view of your key performance indicators (KPI). Business intelligence (BI) is a set of capabilities that allows businesses to collate and process raw data and visualize it as meaningful information. This information becomes available as interactive reports and dashboards to the employees and management to enable data-based decision-making.

How does BI work?

1. Most of the time, data in an enterprise exists in silos with various departments like marketing, sales, HR, and operations. This raw data is pulled from multiple heterogeneous systems, cleaned, collated, and stored as linked tables in a central data warehouse.
2. Business users extract the necessary reports using BI applications by querying this data warehouse. BI enables users to slice and dice the data across various parameters to generate actionable insights.
3. BI applications also provide ready-to-use dashboards that are updated in real-time and offer a visual representation of the data to management for overseeing their operations.
4. Advance data science services employ data mining techniques to identify patterns in the data that can be useful. Business analytics is also a part of BI that goes one step further and uses statistical methods to predict future outcomes based on historical data.

How does BI help improve the bottom line?

With BI systems in place, data drives strategic decisions. It eliminates the influence of biases, prejudices, and individual experiences from the decision-making process. A data-driven culture can have a direct positive impact on your business’s bottom line. Let’s see how.

#1 BI drives sales growth by empowering your team with customer and market intelligence. 

Customer intelligence

You can leverage data from your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), marketing campaign tools, salesforce automation tools and customer service applications to generate an in-depth understanding of your customers.

• You can provide your marketing executives with region-wise, customer segment-wise, channel-wise, and product-wise revenue figures to better allocate marketing budgets and generate maximum ROI.
• Your sales team can get a real-time view of sales funnels with accurate lead scores indicating their probability of conversion.
• Your customer service executives get visibility into pending complaints, customer satisfaction scores, and customer loyalty segments.

Once empowered with this customer intelligence, your customer-facing functions can drive sales growth like never before.

Market intelligence

• Market share reports and dashboards can help you understand which products perform best against your competition.
• Data obtained from sales channel partners such as distributors and retailers provide crucial insights about products, brands, pricing, and margins that the competition offers.
• Advanced business analytics can also help you monitor social media for sentiment analysis.

This market intelligence is crucial for entering new markets and launching new products.

#2 BI reduces costs by increasing employee efficiency and correcting bottlenecks. 

Improves workforce productivity

• With ready interactive reports, your workforce does not need to follow up with the IT department for every ad-hoc report requirement. Strategy meetings are more fruitful as data from various departments is readily available in unified interactive reports.
• Most BI tools are available even on mobile phones, eliminating the need for your field agents to visit the office for data requirements.
• BI dashboards can also help employees track their performance targets, KPIs and related incentives in real-time. It helps them plan and organize their activities better.

All these features save time and effort for your workforce and directly improve productivity.

Identifies supply chain bottlenecks

• BI enables you to track and predict demand for your products across time, regions, and channels. This visibility, in turn, helps your operations team to plan capacity and optimize inventory to meet this demand.
• BI can also help provide ready reports about delayed shipments, on-time shipments, and product returns for your operations team to identify blockages and remove them.

It has a direct impact on reducing supply chain costs and inventory costs.

How to start?

Before exploring BI solutions in the market, it is necessary to assess how data is stored and used across your enterprise. It is also crucial to list specific use cases where BI can create maximum value for your business. There are several BI solutions available in the market. Cloud-based BI tools are easier to set up and use, whereas on-prem solutions offer better flexibility. Based on these considerations, you should select a BI tool that best meets your requirements.

While most BI tools have many in-built reports and dashboards, customizing them to your business needs requires skilled BI resources. Also, integrating all your enterprise systems to provide clean, de-duplicated data into a central data warehouse for BI reporting is a meticulous exercise. It is better to outsource integration and customization to an experienced consulting company providing business intelligence services. This will reduce costs, shorten the time taken for implementation and enable you to generate immediate ROI on your BI system implementation.