You need to move beyond manual data operations towards business intelligence.
If you don’t want to get left behind, you need to implement this integral process into your business.
This self-same system has helped many businesses of various industries from logistics to retail to thrive in all crisis situations, even the ongoing pandemic.
So if you want to grow your business with the power of data, you need to read this guide on business intelligence.
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business Intelligence is an assortment of software tools, supporting infrastructure, and data practices intended to leverage business data to hone decision-making. It manages to help companies in tracking their business performance from the data gathered. Trends can also be found where it helps in the probable improvements in business processes. It seeks to harness data to increase profits and improve business performance.
BI is an offshoot innovation of the decision support system (DSS) which was first introduced in the 1960s. It involves analyzing data through an organization. It is entirely important in all modern enterprises as it provides insights into the company’s performance, strategies, and operational inputs. Moreover, this helps leaders create data-driven decisions.
Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics
Business Intelligence and Business Analytics are related at some point but have distinct purposes.
BI is centered around information perception and revealing, whilst business analytics is all the more frequently the domain of data analytics, who rather work with programming languages like Python or R, and exploit their computational, and measurable aptitude to address troublesome business issues. Business Analytics can be considered as a subset of BI. BI utilizes analytics, but analytics does not utilize BI.
Benefits of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is a tool used to improve business’ performances. With that, it provides many advantages which allow businesses to stay on top of their competitors. The following things are some advantages that BI provides to businesses:
Provides insights
It is a dynamic platform that helps companies in solving problems in the business. This assists the clients with appreciating the intricacies of the business and gaining more up-to-date insights into the mechanism of operation.
Improves deals and negotiation prospects
Business Intelligence makes an important contribution to the sales team by making accessible instant reports on sales trends, new market scenarios, consumer preferences, and so forth. The reports produced by BI systems are exceptionally precise and up to date.
Ability to understand datasets
By acquiring the capacity to comprehend which datasets are pertinent to specific objectives, methodologies, and initiatives in your company, you will recognize patterns that will assist you with making critical enhancements in various key aspects of the company.
BI also finetunes data collection and organization. With BI, companies can transform scattered data into controllable chunks and use them to apply them to make the company more efficient.
More accurate forecasting
The digestible patterns and data served up by online BI tools and solutions offer a feasible method for accurate forecasting and setting up plans to either keep disasters from happening or exploit likely trends before your competitors.
Benchmarking is more precise
By working with BI-based key performance indicators (KPIs), you’ll gain the capacity to define noteworthy objectives. Thus, this will speed up your business success by assisting you with defining methodologies and working towards fundamental benchmarks with more efficiency.
Basic BI Concepts
When it comes to business intelligence, you need to break it down into several concepts to comprehend the system. Here are the fundamentals you need to know about BI:
Data
The data is the first component in BI. This data could be everything from sales records, marketing keywords, payroll scale to financial statements. The present BI solutions have different data connectors that let clients consolidate all databases into one centralized data warehouse, so they can work on insights conjointly and hone cross-database analysis.
Data warehouse
This is a centralized repository for data. Data here is used by analytic systems. BI tools use the data warehouse to produce insights for decision-making.
Data lakes
Data lakes are similar to data warehouses, but they are designed to store raw, unstructured data. This is mainly for the flexibility to analyze the data in many different ways, to suit the company’s needs.
Data modeling
Data modeling is for data governance – turning the data into consistent, manageable and reusable formats. It is vital for BI because it shows where data is located, what it means, and how it can be used by various systems and tools.
Data Mining
This is where you find patterns in vast datasets, through machine learning, statistics, and database systems. This is integral for data management and proper data structuring. For example, businesses can mine CRM data to predict which leads are most likely to buy.
Data integration
The process of bringing together various disparate data sources into a processing and storage system useful for generating business intelligence and data analytics is called data integration.
Data access, analytics, and presentation
Once you have integrated all your data so they can work together, you need to harness that data. This means accessing the data, analyzing for key patterns, and presenting digestible insights. These steps can blend together, especially if you will utilize interactive dashboards which let you view in and out of your data, depending on what your business needs.
Data dashboarding and reporting
It can track, monitor, and report your data. By approaching an adaptable, adjustable, data-driven web-based dashboard, you can set targets, distinguish patterns, spot trends, and reveal insights on growth and improvement. With intuitive functionality and data visualization, these insights can be shared with other key movers wherever they may be and whenever they are available.
BI Tools
Choosing suitable Business Intelligence tools is one of the main steps in BI execution. Back in the day, spreadsheets were most used in terms of analyzing data, however, at present, it may not be as useful and convenient as it was. Thus, specialized BI tools were created to ease such inconvenience. With that, here are common BI tools:
Power BI
Created by Microsoft, Power BI is a platform with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing data. If you know Microsoft’s suite of products, Power BI is a very versatile self-service tool for your business intelligence system. With this, you can create data models from cleaned-up data that will show the business performance through charts and data visualizations.
Power BI also enables business leaders to create accurate forecasts through clear, detailed business data reports. Microsoft created Power BI with significant data analytics features:
- Artificial Intelligence – This feature offers image recognition, text analytics and automated machine learning.
- Hybrid deployment support – Here Power BI can connect different data sources from Microsoft, Salesforce, etc.
- Quick Insights – Here Power BI users can create data subsets and get automatic data analytics.
- Common data model support – Power BI also provides support for a standardized and extensible collection of data schemas (entities, attributes and relationships).
- Cortana integration – You can use Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant to vocally query data using natural language.
- Customization – Best of all, Power BI allows people to get a custom made visualization and reporting platform.
Datapine
This BI tool allows you to connect your data from different sources and analyze them using advanced features. With this platform, you can easily create a powerful dashboard that reports any anomalies and general information about your data.
SAS Business Intelligence
SAS Business Intelligence is a software offering various items and advances for information researchers, text experts, information engineers, determining investigators, econometricians, and streamlining modelers, among others.
Clear Analytics
This is an apparatus that solidifies information from inner frameworks, cloud, bookkeeping, CRM, and permits you to move that information into Excel.
SAP Business Objects
This is a business knowledge suite intended for far-reaching revealing, examination, and information perception. They furnish Office incorporations with Excel and PowerPoint where you can make live introductions and cross-breed examinations that associate with their on-reason and cloud SAP frameworks.
DOMO
This is a BI arrangement containing different frameworks that are included in this stage, beginning with interfacing the information and getting done with broadening information with pre-assembled and custom applications from the Domo Appstore. You can utilize Domo additionally for your information lakes, distribution centers, and ETL devices, close by with R or Python contents to get ready information for prescient demonstration.
Challenges of BI
As companies of all sizes race to harness the vast amount of data they have, they face many challenges on BI. The following are some of the common challenges of Business Intelligence:
Incorporating data from various sources
The development in data sources means that companies need to arrange data for examination from an assortment of data sets, large data frameworks, and business applications, both on-site and in the cloud.
Data Quality Issues
BI applications are just pretty much as exact as the information they’re based on. Companies need to clean up and gear up their data before starting any BI tasks. When companies use BI tools, they make a data collection measure that includes everybody in figuring out how to guarantee the information is precise, alongside a streamlined, clear-cut system for data cycles.
Information warehouses with conflicting data
Siloed frameworks are another normal business insight challenge. Data insights are necessary for successful BI. However, it’s hard for BI tools to get to siloed information with fluctuating authorization levels and security settings. BI and data governance teams should separate warehouses and organize the data within them. Inconsistent data in silos can lead to multiple versions of the truth.
Poor End-user training
BI projects fail because users aren’t trained or too overwhelmed. For this, internal communication is key. The data and IT teams should align their requirements for the system with the needs of the company. Successful BI projects offer business leaders efficient tools that meet their company’s internal IT requirements.
How To Implement BI
Executing Business Intelligence in your business includes a series of progressive steps. These are the basic steps to implementing BI in your business:
1. Define the Purpose of BI in Your Business
Business Intelligence should sync with the overall philosophy of the company. Since BI is key in the decision-making process, businesses should implement this so it can assist with achieving business goals.
2. Identify and Process Source Data
Source data or atomic data is only raw data that has not yet been processed. Source information is extracted, processed, and organized into information. Processed source data is usually stored in a database.
3. Design the Data Model
You need to design data models to cater to the requirements of the end-users, for their needs and expectations. It should be designed in such a way that the fundamentals are easily identified. You need to account for all errors and discrepancies and allow users to make changes before implementation.
4. Select BI Tools
Choosing suitable BI tools is one of the main steps in implementing BI. The right BI tools make it possible for businesses to accurately measure and manage goals and find ways to deal with exemptions, at whatever point they emerge.
5. Design and Implement BI
This is an extensive process. The main requirement here is that companies should work with IT and information in general. To be able to build an efficient BI system, you need to:
- Research thoroughly to gauge the company’s needs.
- Consider both present and future needs.
- Get the business leaders involved with the IT and data management departments.
- Correctly implement and integrate analysis within the management system.
- Grant access rights to all concerned personnel and departments
6. Discover and Explore New Informational Needs and Business Applications and Practices
Designing a BI model is a nonstop learning measure. As the data is broken down, more up-to-date learning and insights are acquired. As fresher informational requirements are found and investigated, you need to create newer strategies for data management.
Should You Switch to BI for your Business?
In this era of big data, it is an absolute necessity for any company that desires to stay competitive in its space. BI helps you with understanding your business, your customers, your rivals, and the market so you can make the right decisions.
You get improved business performance and save resources in terms of cost, manpower, and error reduction. Business leaders also gain a more holistic view of their business. With this, you can unlock the power of data insights.
In short, you should switch to Business Intelligence to keep your business relevant and thriving in all situations.
Do you want to take your company to the top? Come, take advantage of BI. We at Datahyv will create a customized BI system so your business can improve based on your needs and the market demands.