With the business intelligence market growing, you can choose from countless tools for retrieving, analyzing, and gaining value from raw data. With Gartner predicting that by 2022, 70% of organizations will rigorously track data quality levels via metrics, it is not surprising to see a huge surge in businesses embracing BI.
Six Amazing Benefits of Business Intelligence
A robust BI solution can help you bring together complex data and make informed business decisions in a span of minutes. Whether you are an industry giant, a midsize business, or an evolving startup, you can use BI to turn business data into business opportunities. Wondering how you can benefit from BI? Let’s examine 6 key benefits of business intelligence:
1. Enhance Business Productivity
In the race to reach and stay at the top, organizational productivity is often overlooked in business. But with BI tools, you can reach all your quantitative goals such as monthly sales or on-time delivery targets and track the progress of your business daily.
- Spot internal trends and get insight into under performing processes
- Receive feedback on inefficiencies in your business
- Detect cost-cutting areas in your business
- Monitor your inventory and tweak production accordingly to increase profit margins
- Unearth industry patterns and insights and increase efficiency and forecasting outcomes
2. Improve Access to Crucial Information
With humongous amounts of data generated every second, accessing the right information at the right time to make a crucial business decision can get challenging. BI systems offer visualization tools that provide a better understanding of historical data, real-time updates, forecasts, and trends.
- Convert, merge, and report data with intuitive visuals
- Access important data through dashboards on mobile devices and tablets
- Get instant access to key business metrics for marketing and sales
- Extract crucial details from enormous data at a rapid speed
- Gauge all the trends and decide on the ideal course of action quickly
3. Boost ROI
When companies focus on things that are not aligned with the organizational strategy, they are sure to incur huge costs. BI enables you to establish metrics and KPIs that align with the organizational strategy, offering the needed visibility into business performance and ROI.
- Drive accountability by aligning activities and outcomes with the desired strategic objectives
- Identify areas for cost savings and improve business efficiency
- Leverage the numerous dashboards to improve visibility into inventory, and make better supply chain decisions
- Analyze the manufacturing process and access and collect the data necessary to measure all major productivity and production influencing factors
- Maximize production efficiency throughout the shop floor
4. Fuel Strategic Decision-Making
Making key business decisions based on intuition can spell disaster; it’s preferable if they are made through analytics. BI software facilitates easy collection, rendering, and analysis of data using analytic tools.
- Get actionable insights by analyzing data from business departments, social media, sales, marketing, and digital initiatives
- Spend less time formulating reports and more time in analyzing potential outcomes and driving business decisions
- Minimize costs and efforts spent in preparing state-of-the-art reports and focus on analyzing outcomes and driving better, more profitable decisions
- Strengthen your company’s core and run a more efficient team with faster, better decisions at the forefront
5. Eliminate Waste
If you want to ensure business success, you need to first eliminate waste – anything that is not adding value to a company. BI systems help in identifying areas of waste, helping you improve your bottom line.
- Get a wider view of your company’s statistics and locate areas of waste
- Identify the root causes of defects and eliminate them immediately
- Stay in tune with customer needs, market fluctuations, and business trends, and maintain optimum levels of inventory
- Eliminate bottlenecks in the production process, improve communication, and reduce idle time.
- Reduce gaps in the production process and improve forecasting methods to eliminate work in progress
6. Identify Opportunities
BI systems analyze unstructured data based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics, and aid in understanding what happened, and why it happened.
- Assess business capabilities, and compare strengths and weaknesses
- Identify trends and market conditions and respond quickly to change
- Evaluate performance in terms of customer and competitor experience
- Gain a 360 degree view of prospective business opportunities
- Make more informed choices and maximize profits, while cutting costs
Drive your Business Forward
The more people who have access to the right data, at the right place, and in the right form, the greater the value organizations will derive. IDC forecasts global spending on cognitive systems will reach nearly $31.3 billion in 2019. Gathering data from your business processes and analyzing it can help unearth some surprising and important insights.
BI software allows you to maximize business value by turning every employee into a decision maker. When armed with relevant, real-time information, employees can make data-driven, informed decisions that impact the company’s bottom line. Increase the productivity of your business, improve access to crucial information, improve your ROI, drive strategic decision making, eliminate waste, identify business opportunities ahead of time, and take your business to newer, never-reached-before levels.