Many organisations use business intelligence insights to improve their decision-making skills and as a business owner, you should too. This article will explain what business intelligence is, how it works and what some of the benefits are.
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence is a software that consumes business data and produces reports, charts and graphs that are easy for users to read and make use of. Business intelligence tools help business users to access a range of data which can be used to get information and insights into how successfully their business is performing.
Older forms of business intelligence required IT support and extensive training for users to be able to analyse their data and what it meant. In more recent times, however, regular users can benefit from the analysis that business intelligence systems like Xelix can offer.
How does business intelligence work?
Business intelligence works by bringing together a range of data into a single platform. Things like sales performance, marketing analytics and other data is collected and loaded into a single view that makes decision making easier for business users. This process is generally referred to as Extract, Transform and Load.
The first two parts of the process concern the act of identifying and collecting the relevant sources of data and the ‘load’ part refers to actually uploading the data not an easily accessible digital location. Once this data has been collected into a single, unified data store, reports and other comprehensive insights can be created with ease by the business user. This all helps with the decision-making process.
Benefits of using business intelligence:
Increased efficiency
Business intelligence gives users a way to access data and see which of their operations give the best results. With a universal view of their strategies, users can more easily see areas of opportunity. When businesses spend less time on data analysis and compiling spreadsheets, they have more time to make use of the data in innovative ways to increase the efficiency of the business itself.
Improved customer experience
Business intelligence can have a direct impact on levels of customer satisfaction. An example of how a company has used business intelligence systems to improve customer service, as reported by Forbes, is a wireless network operator who deployed BI systems across multiple systems, which created more then 1,500 dashboards for employees. using these dashboards, employees were able to seek chances to improve customer service and reduce the number of support calls by over 40%.
Better advantage over competitors
Using business intelligence to work out their placement within the market, businesses can be more competitive. Because businesses can analyse data from a range of different sources they can identify the best time to enter the market. They can also keep up with any changes within the industry, monitor chances and predict any customer needs in the future.
Business intelligence can optimise businesses
As you can see, business intelligence processes can help to organise your company’s data and make it easier to access and analyse. Improved decision making is just one of the many benefits that business intelligence can provide.
