Every day organizations take several decisions related to products, customers, marketing, employees, finance, etc. for which they merely use thumb rules, experience and intuition due to inability to perform in-depth analysis of the facts. This poses problems like bad quality decisions, longer response time, increased cost, etc. which restrict them from moving towards the path of growth and excellence.
These continuous problems call for the mechanisms like Business Intelligence which can completely take the business information management to the next level and help in availing the resources and information for making the right decision at the right time for the best of organization’s interest.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is a tool/software for gathering, storing, analyzing and providing access to data and information to organizations for making informed business decisions.
Business Intelligence is a true mechanism to help organizations turn their data into useful information and distribute the same to the individuals and teams when they need it. It allows organizations to understand, predict and analyze the organizational environment and provides a 360 degree view by combining information from various sources. It allows the organizational workers to be more productive and make them self-sufficient by helping them use the resources and data for timely reporting, analyzing, forecasting and decision making.
A typical Business Intelligence applications perform decision making, query search, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining by using fact-based support systems.
Uses of BI
Business Intelligence can be commonly used to
- Identify operational exceptions and key performance indicators
- Compare departmental goals and turnovers
- Identify best-selling products
- Forecast future sales
- Track customer orders
- Check inventory, manufacturing cycle and supply chain logistics
- Analyze results without involving IT resource
- Monitor Performance Metrics
Benefits of Using BI
By implementing Business Intelligence in both organization’s intranet and extranet, can provide the following benefits
- Reduce Cost: BI dramatically reduces the cost of managing and retrieving data and information. Moreover, it gives the insights to various activities and information in fractions of minutes which helps in reducing the overall time and efforts of analyzing the data and acting on information. This also helps reduce the operational costs to a huge extent.
- Enhance Operation Efficiency: Giving real-time access to organizational data to employees result in quick turnaround and increase operational efficiency.
- Eliminates delay: With BI, one can design and implement workflow processes anytime without depending or waiting for the other resources. This eliminates the delay in work schedules.
- Optimum Utilization of Resources: BI identifies the idle resources and helps allocate products, processes and projects to the optimum level thereby increasing the bottom lines.
- Provides Better Deals with Customer’s & Suppliers: BI helps analyze the historical data related to customers and suppliers such as orders, billing, shipping, inventory and identify trends based on which business can quote for the best deals.
- Better Marketing Analytics: BI is an easy way of accessing marketing related information such as customer services, products, promotion campaigns, brands and channel performance, etc. which helps in getting a competitive edge over other players in the market.
- Track Past, Present and Future Trends: Since Business Intelligence stores historical data and also allows forecasting, it helps in tracking past, present and future trends which can help a lot in developing marketing plans and strategies.
- Better Reporting: With BI, an organization can also benefit in terms of enhanced reporting due to the ability to gather true and concise information with accurate mining, analysis and filtering.
- Better Security Control: With BI, organizations can set up better controls and security since they get up-to-date information related to the business data, distribution channels, sales, employees’ performance, etc.
With all these aspects, Business Intelligence allows organizations to take a closer and deeper look within. It creates awareness about the potential problems and recognizes opportunities and transform them into profits aligning individual, departmental and corporate goals.
Shouldn’t your organization adopt Business Intelligence technology to run the operations more intelligently?
