Business Intelligence: How To Apply It In Your Business

At a time when we are surrounded by millions of data and where making decisions based on relevant information is crucial, business intelligence is the key to differentiating ourselves from the competition.

Organizations can use the insights gained from business intelligence to improve their business decisions, identify problems, detect market trends, or discover new business opportunities. Here’s how.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the software infrastructure and services that transform data into actionable insights to make better strategic decisions in an organization.

The main objective of BI is to try to solve the problems that arise from having inaccurate or incomplete information to make important decisions. This system analyzes the data and provides the best information to support the best decisions.

The Advantages of Business Intelligence

There are many reasons why companies adopt business intelligence in their processes. For example, to support functions such as employee recruitment, compliance, or marketing. BI is a core business value, so it is hard to find a business area that does not benefit from better information to work with.

As such, some of the most important advantages of using business intelligence are:

• Faster, more accurate reporting and analysis.
• Improved data quality.
• Increased employee satisfaction.
• Ability to make better decisions.
• Improved ROI through business insight and intelligent resource allocation.
• Knowledge of customer behavior, preferences, and trends.
• Accurate tracking of sales, marketing, and financial performance.
• Alerts on data anomalies and customer issues.

Business Intelligence Systems

Business Intelligence encompasses data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analysis. The great advantage of this business intelligence system is that it creates easy-to-understand reports in various forms, such as spreadsheets, data visualization, analytical processing, etc.

Traditionally, BI platforms are based on storing data for later presentation of reference information. This aggregates data from multiple sources into a central system to support business analysis and reporting.

The interesting thing about business intelligence systems is that they access this warehouse and transform the data into useful results in the form of reports, charts, and maps. There are also solutions that can extract and ingest raw data directly, although they are not the most popular.

Herramientas de inteligencias empresarial

BI tools allow users to access different types of data: historical and current, internal or external, semi-structured or unstructured, etc.

The most common types of tools are:

• Spreadsheets: well-known tools such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets are some of the most popular examples.
• Reporting software: used to report, organize, filter and display data.
• Data visualization: this software translates data sets into visually appealing and easy-to-read graphical representations to extract information quickly.
• Data mining tools: extract large amounts of data to look for patterns through the use of AI, ML or statistics.
• Online analytical processing: known as OLAP, they allow users to analyze data sets from various angles and business perspectives.

Examples of Business Intelligence

As mentioned above, business intelligence improves the way work is done in many business areas, but some of the most relevant examples are:

Sales and Marketing

BI gives greater visibility into the performance of these two departments, consumer behavior, and buying trends, which improves the effectiveness of future initiatives.

Operations

Routine analytical tasks can be automated, which streamlines processes, reduces inefficiencies, and increases productivity.

Customer Experience

Allows resources to be directed to key areas that positively impact customer engagement and support.

Finance

Custom dashboards can also be used to obtain a holistic view of the company’s financial status, study historical data and predict trends.

Security and Compliance

Data is centralized to improve accuracy and transparency, making it easier to detect errors and security issues.

Information is power, but it is even more powerful when its content is understood and used in a useful way. That is why a company must have a data analysis tool that is crucial to carry out a competitive strategy. At Plain Concepts, we help you choose the tool that best suits your needs.