The amount of data available to companies is growing every year and doubling every two years. How to use this information to improve the functioning of the company, and better tailor services, products, and advertising messages to customers?
Modern business intelligence (BI) tools for processing, analyzing, and visualizing data can catch useful information, and non-obvious relationships, detect trends, help understand various processes and forecast them from the information ocean of big data. As a result, better-informed executives, managers, and ordinary employees can make informed business decisions, which translates into building competitive advantages, increasing revenues, and improving operational efficiency.
Deep insights at a glance
If you want to gain deep insight (deep dive) into the behavior of millions of consumers and advertising audiences, BI offers advanced data analytics, data management, information organizing, and reporting. The automatically generated reports are interactive and dynamic, full of infographics, clear charts, summaries, and graphs showing the structure of the data. Such pictorially presented data best explains reality.
BI tools use company spreadsheets, clouds, databases, sales and marketing systems, ERP, CRM, Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and other online platforms as data mines.
Every money counts
How do you “embrace” sales data containing millions of transactions from individual checkout counters across the country, by region, in precise time frames with pinpoint accuracy and including promotions? Sophisticated BI tools will catch products whose sales are rising or falling; identify bestsellers and underperforming products, discover upward and downward trends; show how popular promotional sets are.
Using BI, e-marketing, and e-commerce companies can easily tap into sales trends among their users by analyzing their behavior – reactions to promotions, buying patterns, and online experiences. They immediately learn which ad formats generate the most clicks and leads. With the help of Business Intelligence, it is easier for e-commerce companies to retain valuable customers and capitalize on previously untapped sales opportunities.
Sometimes a company faces problems such as lower sales productivity or customer churn due to poor call center service. That’s when the use of BI tools will help assess where errors and quality problems are occurring and suggest information on how to fix and prevent them in the future.
Examine the links in the supply chain
In e-commerce, it is crucial to optimize the supply chain so as not to generate additional unnecessary costs. Sometimes warehouse A fulfills orders to customers who were closer to warehouse B or C. Instead of restocking all warehouses, it is cheaper to deliver the selected product to the closest warehouse and fulfill the shipment from there. The impetus for this change can be information from a business intelligence system on the cost of logistics handling orders from individual warehouses and the number of kilometers traveled by vehicles delivering goods. Based on the data accumulated by BI tools, it is possible to see how much it costs to send one package – we are talking not only about the cost of shipping but also about additional costs, such as storage or the work of the logistics team.
Business Intelligence provides data that makes it possible to predict stock levels by fully analyzing resources using replenishment, sales, and forecasting data.
Master the tides of money
More and more companies in various market areas cannot do without BI. The standard users of BI solutions are departments such as finance, sales, or controlling, where the largest amounts of data are collected, generated, and systematized. These departments require cash flow reports with charts showing changes in cash flow over time. With these, one can see at a glance which days the company had a surplus and which days it had a deficit. Based on such visualizations, CFOs can estimate when it’s best to overpay loans or make purchases from suppliers. With BI programs, it is also possible to look ahead and accurately forecast costs and revenues for the next two weeks or even a month ahead. This allows companies to prepare for crises coming from week to week and put in place countermeasures in advance, such as rescheduling payments.
Grab information on the fly
With BI, airports can optimize their route network, analyze delays, the most popular destinations, and passenger flows from individual airlines and countries, or study traveler satisfaction.
Reports made with BI tools are also suitable for analyzing the level of air pollution in a given city throughout the year. Taking data from sensors, they automatically refresh.
Business Intelligence getting smarter
Modern business intelligence applications enable self-service analysis without the need for advanced training, specialized analysts, or IT specialists. Choosing analytics in a self-service model allows virtually all team members to analyze the necessary data on their own, leaving the most advanced issues to specialized analysts. Users have mobile access to BI applications, dashboards, and reports via smartphones and tablets. It is worth choosing cloud-based BI platforms, as this ensures full data security and the ability to access regardless of place and time.
Embedded BI places BI functionality and data visualizations directly into business applications or on a website. Users can analyze data in the applications they use in their daily work and find the results on a given website. All the metrics from BI will find their way into your CRM, PMS, CMS, or another system.
Artificial intelligence facilitates user interactions with analytical tools. New solutions allow you to conduct data analysis by asking simple questions using natural language. Communication with BI platforms begins to resemble working with a search engine or even entering voice commands.
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