A recent report shows that the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes, from 64.2 zettabytes in 2020.
With this in mind in today’s data-driven business environment, companies of all sizes are looking for ways to harness the power of data to make informed decisions and gain a competitive advantage.
This article explores everything you need to know about how business intelligence software can help you unlock the full potential of your data and drive business success.
What Is Business Intelligence (BI) software?
Business Intelligence (BI) software is a type of software application that allows businesses to collect, analyse, and present data in a way that helps them make informed decisions.
It typically involves using various data analysis tools and techniques to turn raw data into actionable insights.
BI systems have four main parts:
- Data warehouse – for consolidating vital company information from various sources and storing it in a centralised and accessible location.
- Business analytics or data management tools – for mining and analysing data in the data warehouse.
- Business performance management (BPM) tools – invaluable in tracking and evaluating the progress you make towards your business objectives.
- A user interface – for enabling quick access to information (this is usually an interactive dashboard with data visualisation reporting tools)
The Benefits of Business Intelligence (BI) Software
Here are some of the key benefits of business intelligence:
- Forward-thinking organisations use BI to make sense of ever-increasing amounts of data reliably and economically. They gain real-time visibility into your business performance indicators and identify hidden trends and opportunities for improvement
- Business intelligence offers various tools and techniques to support quick and accurate decision-making. Real-time generated reports offer relevant data, which helps organisations, and their employees make better decisions. BI-based, data-driven decision-making helps companies stay relevant and competitive.
- BI tools often come with advanced interactive dashboard representations of data using simple user interfaces. This offers the ability to visualise information in a graphical format to understand data more insightfully. Reports can be highly customised and KPIs monitored using more than one data source.
- The ability to manage and meld access to various data sources provides a 360-degree view of your business and your company that is not possible in a siloed data environment. A 360-degree view of all activities helps companies identify issues, improve operations, increase sales, and in turn, increase revenue.
- BI can help you identify what services or products you’re lacking and improve customer satisfaction by making necessary changes. BI helps to increase profit margins by providing insights that lead to future sales and guide where to spend future budgets. Reports help you understand customer behaviour, develop user personas, and use real-time data on the customer’s feedback to make corrective changes and improve customer service and, therefore, satisfaction.
- Using BI data, you can assess team members’ strengths and weaknesses and assign relevant training modules to support success. BI tools can automatically recognize positive behaviour while regularly tracking worker contributions and improvement.
- BI insight into the corporation’s raw data will help decision-makers analyse cost-saving opportunities like excess inventory, human resource redundancies, marketing overages, too many vendors or waste in facilities management.
- BI enables faster reporting, analysis and planning because of access to global data. The system’s analysis capabilities make it possible to react to market or other conditions quickly, giving companies speed and competitive advantage.
- BI enables companies in gaining a competitive edge by making it possible to find and react to new opportunities quickly. With this, companies can use the data to identify market trends and improve profit margins. When a company can leverage the existing data at the right time to make accurate decisions faster, they gain a competitive edge and enable product and service differentiation.
- BI tools can help organisations to identify and resolve discrepancies, inefficiencies, and errors.
Where Can You Use BI to Drive Growth and Success?
Business intelligence enables data-informed improvements in various business functions like marketing, finance, sales, operations, finance, support, HR and customer care individually and together.
Here are examples of how various teams and departments use business intelligence to drive growth and success:
- Finance: Finance teams can leverage the power of BI tools to quickly uncover and analyse financial data, thereby gaining valuable insights from which decisions can be made. Additionally, this technology enables an increased understanding of factors that impact profit and loss.
- Data scientists and analysts: Analysts are BI power users and utilise centralised business data coupled with cutting-edge analytics tools to identify areas that need improvement and come up with strategic recommendations for company decision-makers.
- Marketing: With real-time campaign tracking, marketing teams can track campaign metrics from a centralised location, enabling them to see all the right data to make informed decisions to improve their outreach and lead generation efforts.
- Operations: By accessing and analysing data such as supply chain metrics, operation managers can efficiently conserve time and resources while optimising processes. Additionally, business intelligence solutions facilitate the meeting of service-level agreements, further aiding in improving distribution routes for optimal performance.
- Sales: Sales and account managers often use BI dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs) for quick access to complex information like discount analysis, customer profitability and customer lifetime value. Business intelligence tools allow them to monitor revenue targets along with the status of the sales pipeline using dashboards with reports and data visualisations.
By embracing data-driven insights, every team and individual within an organisation can unlock their full potential. With the help of Business Intelligence, they’re able to make better decisions that drive business success.
Conclusion
This is where business intelligence comes in, providing organisations with the tools and processes to gather, process, and analyse large volumes of data, and turn it into actionable insights. By leveraging BI, organisations can gain a better understanding of their operations, customers, and markets, and make more informed decisions based on data-driven insights.