Why is Business Intelligence (BI) important to your company

Business Intelligence, BI is a concept that usually involves the delivery and integration of relevant and useful business information in an organization. Companies use BI to detect significant events and identify/monitor business trends in order to adapt quickly to their changing environment and a scenario. If you use effective business intelligence training in your organization, you can improve the decision making processes at all levels of management and improve your tactical and strategic management processes. Here are some of the main reasons for investing in a good BI strategy and system.

Gain Insights into Consumer Behaviour:

One of the main advantages of investing in BI and skilled personnel is the fact that it will boost your ability to analyze the current consumer buying trends. Once you understand what your consumers are buying, you can use this information to develop products that match the current consumption trends and consequently improve your profitability.

To Improve Visibility:

Do you know who the best performers are?

Can you easily identify areas for improvement?

Is stock going missing and you can’t identify where it’s going?

Is there an error in your accounts and you need to drill down to invoicing or billing quickly to make your P&L balance – can you do this in a few clicks or do you need to re-run a report that takes forever?

If you want to improve your control over various important processes in your organization, you should consider investing in a good BI system. This will improve the visibility of these processes and make it possible to identify any areas that need improvement. Moreover, if you currently have to skim through hundreds of pages in your detailed periodic reports to assess the performance of your organisation’s processes, you can save time and improve productivity by having skilled intelligence analysts using relevant BI software. Good BI should be at the heart of every organisation as it can provide increased control. Visibility is essential.

To Turn Data into Actionable Information:

A BI system is an analytical tool that can give you the insight you need to make successful strategic plans for your organization. This is because such a system would be able to identify key trends and patterns in your organisation’s data and consequently make it easier for you to make important connections between different areas of your business that may otherwise seem unrelated. As such, a BI system can help you understand the implications of various organisational processes better and enhance your ability to identify suitable opportunities for your organization, thus enabling you to plan for a successful future.

To Improve Efficiency:

One of the most important reasons why you need to invest in an effective BI system is because such a system can improve efficiency within your organisation and, as a result, increase productivity. You can use business intelligence to share information across different departments in your organization. This will enable you to save time on reporting processes and analytics. This ease in information sharing is likely to reduce duplication of roles/duties within the organization and improve the accuracy and usefulness of the data generated by different departments. Furthermore, information sharing also saves time and improves productivity.

To Gain Sales & Market Intelligence

Whether you are a sales person or a marketer, you probably like to keep track of your customers – probably using a CRM to help you. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It refers to software that handles all aspects of an organization’s interactions with its customers. In other words, it collects the data about your customer and tries to make sense of it, presents it to you in various tables and charts. That may include the entire sales cycle, from winning new customers, to servicing and tracking existing customers, to providing post-sales services. CRM systems are now more involved in decision-support processes than ever before. In our next articles, we will look at how BI can help increase your sales efficiently and gain a further insight into your current market as well as market entry support.

To Gain Competitive Intelligence

BI can also be used to gain an insight into what your competitors are doing. This strengthens your company’s ability to make decisions and plan for the future. We will look further into this area of expertise in our next articles.

Conclusion

In order to reap all the benefits of an effective business intelligence system and strategy for your company, we recommend you invest in skilled BI personnel as well as training, and a software designed for analytical efficiency and accessibility. You should also make sure that the system and strategy you choose can analyze both the content and context of data. If you require any training or consulting in Business Intelligence, then please contact us.

Business Intelligence, For Intelligent Business

Yass Al-Hassani MSc BSc

Director, 105 Solutions Ltd