Business intelligence (BI) is designed to analyze and manage data related to your business operations. Here are 10 key benefits BI tools can add to your business. Let’s take a look at the benefits of business intelligence software.
What is the Importance of Business Intelligence (BI) in Today’s World?
Business intelligence is actually the realization of the process and results from data to information, from information to knowledge, from knowledge to decision-making, and from decision-making to wealth through computer technology.
Business intelligence software (BI) contains a series of data analysis tools designed to analyze and manage data related to your business operations. With digital transformation, more and more companies are introducing business intelligence (BI) in their daily operations and business decisions, and they are paying more and more attention to business intelligence.
So, many people who don’t understand business intelligence will wonder why so many companies start to use business intelligence? What are the benefits of business intelligence for enterprises?
Understanding these issues can help you understand the benefits of business intelligence to enterprises very well.
Some of the benefits of business intelligence include rich visualization capabilities that allow companies to monitor sales, logistics, and even productivity. It also provides extensive data analysis using rich visual reports.
By displaying data in an easy-to-understand format, BI software can help you better understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business, while providing actionable insights on KPIs and other important indicators. This makes it a key tool to ensure competitiveness and profitability.
10 Key Benefits of Business Intelligence (BI)
Powerful business intelligence solutions can help you integrate complex data and make smart business decisions within minutes. Whether you are an industry giant, a medium-sized company, or a growing startup, you can use BI to turn business data into business opportunities. If you want to know how to benefit from business intelligence?
Here are 10 key benefits BI tools can add to any business. Let’s take a look at the benefits of business intelligence:
1. Get a deep understanding of your business
Business intelligence software continuously collects and analyzes data in order to provide actionable insights for your business.
Professionals can generate reports for various data sets, such as expenses, operating procedures, staffing, and customer service. You can use BI tools to create many types of reports. All BI platforms will provide pre-formatted reporting functions that can collect data on common KPIs.
Companies can also generate customized or self-service BI reports to apply the outstanding visual effects of BI to unique, organization-specific data sets. If none of these options meet your needs, users can run ad hoc reports, which are fully aggregated by users and usually focus on very specific KPIs that other reports cannot locate.
Since the report contains relevant data collected in your business operations, companies can take better actions based on the information contained in the BI report. In addition, you don’t have to be a data scientist to use BI tools. The data visualizations generated by these tools are easy to understand and explain.
2. Visualize important information
A large amount of data is generated every second, and accessing the right information at the right time to make critical business decisions can be challenging. One of the main advantages of BI software is that it provides excellent data visualization capabilities, enabling users to create intuitive data visualizations that are easy to understand historical data, real-time updates, forecasts, and trends.
Compared with digital or spreadsheet blocks, charts, graphs, videos, animations, and infographics are more attractive ways of information transmission. The human brain has difficulty processing cognitive information (information that is explained and digested at a glance) much slower than visual information.
With BI tools, you can:
- Use intuitive visual effects to transform, merge and report data.
- Access important data through dashboards on your mobile devices, tablets or laptops.
- Instant access to key business indicators for marketing and sales.
- Quickly extract key details from large amounts of data.
- Measure all trends and quickly determine the ideal course of action.
3. Optimize data mining process
Business intelligence tools are very suitable for powerful data mining. Data mining is the process of finding data patterns to identify trends and derive insights. It can be divided into five steps: collection, storage, organization, analysis and presentation.
Some BI platforms can perform all these steps for the organization, although other BI platforms require the support of business analysis tools, big data analysis systems, or data warehouse platforms.
BI analyzes, processes and presents large amounts of data, which cannot be managed by weaker procedures. It is integrated with data warehouse solutions, internal databases (such as SQL Server), and structured and unstructured data. This provides easy access to valuable information and enhances decision-making processes that companies might otherwise miss.
Because BI software can instantly analyze incoming data, it can help companies seize short-lived opportunities that might otherwise be missed. By connecting customized reports generated by BI to the data warehouse, companies can more easily understand trends in company spending, staffing, operations, and customer development.
4. Improve business productivity
The primary purpose of using BI reports is to improve business productivity. An organized business intelligence platform helps discover hidden patterns and trends that individual systems often do not detect.
BI tools help make it easier to interpret and better communicate data sets into the KPIs needed to make business decisions.
With BI tools, you can achieve all quantitative goals, such as monthly sales or on-time delivery goals, and track your business progress every day.
By using BI technology, you can:
- Identify internal trends and gain insight into underperforming processes.
- Receive feedback about the inefficiency of your business.
- Cost reduction area in the inspection business.
- Monitor your inventory and adjust production accordingly to increase profit margins.
- Discover industry patterns and insights to improve efficiency and predict results.
5. Eliminate non-value-added activities
If you want to ensure business success, you need to eliminate waste first anything that does not add value to the company.
Business intelligence can help companies understand their own operating conditions and their driving forces, and help users clearly understand the future trends of products, what anomalies in operations and what behaviors are affecting the business, and the performance of employees is also easy to track and manage.
The BI system helps to identify waste areas and helps you increase profits. You can:
- Get a more comprehensive understanding of your company’s statistics and identify areas of waste.
- Identify the root causes of defects and eliminate non-value-added activities immediately.
- Align with customer needs, market fluctuations and business trends, and maintain optimal inventory levels.
- Eliminate bottlenecks in the production process, improve communication and reduce idle time.
- Reduce gaps in the production process, improve forecasting methods, and eliminate work in progress.
6. Improve the quality of decision-making
Business intelligence can provide a global view of your business data and help decision-makers look at the problem more comprehensively and reduce the risk of decision errors.
BI software can convert data into knowledge to assist decision-making, enabling decision-makers to make decisions more quickly and accurately, and can inject new revolutionary management ideas into the enterprise.
BI software uses analysis tools to:
- Simplify the collection, presentation and analysis of data.
- Gain actionable insights by analyzing data from business units, social media, sales, marketing and digital plans.
- Spend less time developing reports, spend more time analyzing potential results and driving business decisions.
- Minimize the cost and workload for compiling the latest reports, and focus on analyzing the results and driving better and more profitable decisions.
- Strengthen the core of the company, operate a more efficient team, and make faster and better decisions at the forefront.
7. Improve employee performance
Performance is important to all employees, but especially to customer-facing employees because these are the people most likely to influence customer experiences.
Before business intelligence, employees had to write a large number of complex SQL statements and produce a large number of reports to meet business requirements. This made it difficult for decision-makers to analyze and deal with a large amount of accumulated report data.
Business intelligence has completely changed this status quo, enabling business personnel to easily perform data analysis, allowing decision-makers to view the analysis freely, and to timely view the data that they care about in decision-making. With BI Dashboard, employers can easily see how their employees are performing.
Business intelligence tools should not be used to pressure or punish employees, but rather to provide them with the tools they need to perform their work. When business intelligence tools are paired with omnichannel platforms and data-driven tools, employees become empowered in their roles.
8. Improve the return on investment
When companies focus on things that are inconsistent with organizational strategy, they are bound to incur huge costs. BI enables you to establish metrics and KPIs that align with your organization’s strategy, thereby providing the visibility you need for business performance and ROI.
BI tools are very useful to:
- Promote accountability by aligning activities and results with desired strategic goals.
- Use numerous dashboards to increase visibility into inventory and make better supply chain decisions.
- Analyze the manufacturing process and visit and collect the data necessary to measure all major productivity and production influencing factors.
- Identify areas for saving costs and improving business efficiency.
- Maximize the production efficiency of the entire workshop.
9. Recognize new opportunities
Business Intelligence analyzes unstructured data based on qualitative and quantitative indicators and helps understand what happened and why.
With BI tools, decision-makers can analyze data and identify trends, recognize new opportunities about where costs can be cut, and money can be saved.
BI tools can help:
- Evaluate business capabilities and compare strengths and weaknesses.
- Identify trends and market conditions, and quickly respond to changes.
- Evaluate performance based on the experience of customers and competitors.
- Obtain a 360-degree view of potential business opportunities.
- Make smarter choices to maximize profits while reducing costs.
10. Increase customer satisfaction and boost sales
If you focus on business intelligence in your customer experience function, you can create a broader appreciation of business intelligence across the business. Business intelligence has been proven to enhance company success, and if you use it to enhance success in the customer experience, you will have key data that you can show to senior employees about how successful the project is.
One of the main benefits of improving customer experience is increased sales. When customers are happier, they spend more money on each purchase and also buy from your company more frequently. If that’s not enough, consider that they also tell their friends and family about their experience and bring more customers to your business. The foundation of a great customer experience is loyalty promotion. Your loyal customers spend a lot of money on your products, and they become promoters of your brand.
When you start working with BI solutions and become intentional about collecting customer data, you begin to understand your customers. Many companies think they understand their customers, but in reality, they don’t. It is only by discovering patterns that you find things that you would not have discovered on your own.
Every company has its own sales and marketing goals, and these goals often feel overwhelming for employees. With BI software, you can see exactly which parts of your marketing are successful and which are not. You can focus more time, attention and resources on marketing campaigns that are proven to be effective and boost your sales without doing a lot of extra work.
Final thoughts
Business intelligence software has a series of advantages. BI is a growing industry and the value of BI systems to enterprises is becoming more and more obvious and if implemented properly, it has many proven advantages.
Business intelligence allows users to have targeted insights for the organization to make smart business decisions.
BI software can collect, organize, mine, and visualize key KPIs. It eliminates waste and guesswork, promotes effective inventory management, and improves sales intelligence.
The powerful BI software provides users with a competitive advantage that can bring about tremendous changes in today’s era.
