There is no business that likes to leave money on the table. It’s tempting for companies to try to squeeze as much output as possible from their workforce. The issue with this approach is that it’s not sustainable. Stressed out employees get burned out easily.
Too much data, demand, and digital elements—while also an enormous source of growth—can contribute to increasing work stress. A key solution to fight this business crisis is to deliver more intelligence to work.
If you’re a business owner, business intelligence lets you make intelligent decisions by using data to generate desired business results, saving you from squandering time, resources, and energy.
Business Intelligence in a Nutshell
Business Intelligence (BI) pertains to a variety of tools, programs, technologies, and practices. These are used to collect, integrate, measure, analyze, and present raw information to generate insightful, valuable, and actionable business data.
BI provides a range of techniques and systems that make it easy for your business to:
Gather data from internal and external sources
Prepare data for analysis
Design and run inquiries against the data
Produce reviews, dashboards, and data visualizations
These all aim to generate analytical results that will be available to both your company’s executives (decision-makers) and employees (operational workers). BI tools and programs are used to glean important details such as market trends, internal insights, and parallels in lost opportunities.
You can also use business intelligence to:
Reduce costs
Discover new business ventures and prospects
Identify ineffective business techniques
Evaluating which work makes the most significant impression becomes a struggle for organizations without business intelligence.
How Does Business Intelligence Work?
Technically, business intelligence is not new technology. Modern BI descends from the foundation of the Decision Support System (DSS) in the mid-’60s. It took about three decades before BI achieved widespread approval. Today, it has become an effective tool in all kinds of businesses.
So, how does business intelligence work? The simple answer: by using a data-capture process, pieces of information are obtained from several sources and documented in a database specially designed for your business.
The final BI output presented is visual, but to completely understand how BI works—and to fully maximize its benefits—you need to go back to the fundamentals of the process: the data. This area is often the realm of the company’s IT department, but as a business owner or executive, you need to know its workings so that you can apply BI more effectively and accurately when you market your product or service.
Examining your data goes as follows:
Understand your data
First, analyze your data sources. Where does your data come from? Is the data structured or unstructured? Is it in Excel sheets or an SQL database? You need to have decent data sources, with the data stored properly. The data also needs to be complete before you begin analyzing it for assessment.
Integrate
When you have all your data at hand, you can integrate all that information together. This is where business analytics tools, data mining, and (sometimes) real-time decision-making come in. Tables in your data sources need to be built then linked together so you can start analyzing them and draw value out of all that information.
Dig
When the analysis shows up, the ability to generate insights takes place. This is the part where you dig deeper into the data to extract meanings out of the numbers. This is also the phase where you can do text mining, to evaluate your website and other external resources.
Scale
When you’ve extracted the data, you can start scaling. You review your data to understand how your business is arranged, how the data courses through your business, and how your business practices work. Is your shipping on time? Does customer support work fast enough? Do you have the right inventory when needed?
Present
When all the data is accumulated, measured, and assessed, presentation is the final stage. This is where visualizations are built in the form of team scorecards, dashboards, or graphs for your users.
Business intelligence is a great deal more than just a visualization tool. It is a process and a way to use your data to help you make informed decisions. BI is an effective strategy to view the behind-the-scenes of your business so you can manage operations successfully.
Who Uses Business Intelligence?
As businesses continue to use various systems to attain a competitive edge, BI has turned into a buzzword—but who really can benefit the most from business intelligence?
Senior Executives, Department Managers, Sales Reps
An effective BI tool is designed to be used by all company employees, from senior executives to department managers to sales representatives. It gathers data from all disparate programs and presents complete insights in a single, secure place. Employees from a specific department can access the data relevant to their position and determine actionable insights distinctive to their domain.
Executives
On an executive level, business intelligence gives a clear and detailed picture of the overall performance of your company. Executives can customize their BI tools’ dashboards and individualize the metrics that are pertinent to their specific needs. They can get readily available, updated data to help them create fact-based plans, which helps them ensure that they make crucial decisions based on acquired data instead of instinct alone.
Operations/Inventory Team
BI is a very reliable tool in managing stock and inventory activities. Streamlining the company’s supply management goes a long way in reducing costs and preventing losses. Business intelligence offers the ability to see precisely how much product you have available as well as the sales history of that stock. This data allows your inventory manager to maintain correct stock levels. Using this information, your purchasing manager can load a stockroom with enough products to meet the demand without overstocking. By averting overstock, company capital can be used elsewhere. Furthermore, the risk of unsold stock is prevented.
Finance Supervisor/Accountants
The state of the company’s finances is an important aspect of any organization. With BI, financial supervisors and accountants can easily access financial statements to assess and investigate your company’s financial health. With a complete view of the figures, the financial department can discern which areas need improvement. Through in-depth data, they can also create better financial strategies.
Marketers
Your marketing team can use BI to discover trends and facilitate the rollout of marketing campaigns. BI tools can likewise measure the effectiveness of a finished campaign. Having a complete review also enables the marketing team to optimize the company’s advertising budget.
Data Analysts
Statisticians by nature, data analysts use BI data to gather fresh insights that can be used to underscore new business strategies.
IT Team
IT is yet another key participant in the realm of business intelligence. With BI tools, IT can work better and closer with other departments to ensure that the latter gets the most from data analytics. IT also helps in bridging the gap between subdivisions to maximize BI adoption across the board.