If 'why is business intelligence important' your question, chances are, you have already encountered a lot of information around it, but no filtered reason if it really makes sense for your business! Worry not, here’s your BI binge fix, from BinaryFolks, with facts.
Introduction to Business Intelligence
With the total number of currently functioning startups in the USA summing up to around 71,153, the competition shouldn’t be very hard to guess, right?
And clearly, with the number of competitors increasing with each passing year, the need of improving the business operations & offerings evidently become a compulsion.
However, figuring out the sweet spot to build your competitive advantage is tougher than it may sound. But whether you are standing at a 0 or 5 on a scale of 10 in terms of workflow digitization, BI can take it up right from there and brew growth, if implemented thoughtfully enough.
So, why is business intelligence important for your organization?
Details ahead!
Define Business Intelligence
Most articles will tell you,
Business Intelligence, commonly abbreviated as BI, is a carefully put-together amalgamation of processes driven by a set of technologies, to extract actionable insights and factually back business decisions.
Too much information at once, right? Let’s simplify!
Take your business processes to be a box of jumbled puzzle pieces and the organized picture to be your business goal. Now, think of BI as the power tool handling the entire intermediate process that arranges the puzzle to match the reference image!
Let’s have a quick look at the primary functions that comes under the scope of BI :
- Analyzing business data for contextual categorization & utilization
- Generating custom reports with advanced visualization
- Compiling summaries of extracted core information
- Tracking business processes end-to-end
Why is Business Intelligence Important for your Business?
The neck-break competition is surely concerning for any business today, regardless of its size, but with business intelligence strategically slipped into your workflow, it’s a half-cracked nut already! Here’s a list of the primary areas where BI can ease your struggle (but, there’s more!) :
1. Get the Pulse of your Customers
Ever wondered how Uber Eats tells you “Hey! It’s pizza-o-clock, hungry yet?” just around your lunch-break, while your health freak sister receives a “Power up with a protein platter, princess!” notification?
Or,
How does Amazon adjust your “You may also like” to feature collapsible sippers & folding umbrellas after you ordered the last minute travel essentials and then, changes to flexi bands & dumbbells after you place an order for a yoga mat to finally shed the extra kilos post-trip? That’s just some smart BI model watching (and taking a note of!) your online activities on these sites, to sell you more, while being relevant!
Well implemented business intelligence strategies can help you understand the target customers’ ever-changing preferences by closely tracking their purchase patterns in real-time. Through building robust buyer’s personas, it helps you segment the potential customers so you can cater them better. While that comes handy for your offering line modification, it also gets you a loyal customer base (& thus, a fatter bottom-line!).
2. Gain Better Transparency
So, once I heard somebody say this at a conference while explaining why ‘tracking’ is more important than most businesses think, and that hasn’t left my head ever since. So he said, “If you track your processes well enough, the issues you face at any point in your business gets 50X easier to solve”.
Business intelligence dashboards work great towards that goal, as you get all the tracked data visualized & reported conveniently at one place. So, you can access ‘what happened - when - how’ at any point of time, with a couple of clicks, implying transparency end-to-end. While this visibility makes the process of identifying anomalies & rectifying them easier, it also adds up to the efficiency, significant time & cost saving. With this transparency benefit, BI gets the brownie points for making remote working a breeze while keeping the organizational wellbeing at the forefront too.
3. Boost Decisions with Filtered Insights
Let’s consider the situation, Around 2022 August, it’s time for your clothing business to plan your fall-winter stock, which also has a festive overlap (think Christmas!). Now how do you take a call on what clothing category to focus on? Luxury loungewear keeping in mind the last couple of years’ Covid restrictions that had mandated at-home celebrations,
Or,
Blingy party wear because the restrictions are now loosened? Well, that’s exactly where BI can step in, present data points clearly indicating your customers’ purchase trends over the timeline under consideration & help your decision making with the ready insights that matter! Smell revenue boost yet?
Simply put, business intelligence takes in enormous unstructured data generated by your day-to-day business operations and transforms them into actionable insights that factually support strategic decisions. As a result, you have a clear picture of customer behavior over a period of time, their preferences & what impacts them handy, so you plan your next move in-line with them, ensuring a higher ROI.
4. Operational Efficiency
One of the ‘must-have’ features of facility management software is asset management, which enables organizations to access details, monitor, and control their facility spaces, assets, and equipment from a single platform. This increases long-term system cohesion, boots reliability, improves compliance and provides optimal functionality in the most cost-effective way. Additionally, you can also develop the asset management module of your FM software to keep track of all the physical assets and equipment of the organization using GPS and other web-based technologies.
Discuss your operational challenges
5. Real-Time Data Management
Answering why business intelligence is important for a business is incomplete without talking about real-time data management. With an increased number of data generated from the business processes with each passing day, there’s now a need to process them instantly as they’re put in. The purpose, in most cases, is to serve the users in a more convenient way, adjusting the offering to a higher accuracy. BI stores & analyzes the production data of all kinds, starting from material data to traceability data and much more. With such constant monitoring, the process of ‘planning’ to ‘executing’ new ideas & even modifying some strategies that may not be bearing expected outcomes, become a cakewalk too.
Top BI Use Cases Today
The benefits of business intelligence are being widely adopted across industries today and after reading the last section, you already know the reason. While for each department of your organization, the opportunities of making BI work is practically endless, here goes the key use-cases that you can take a cue from, for starters :
Business Intelligence Use-Cases Across Departments
1. Business Intelligence in Sales & Marketing
- Track consumer purchase patterns for planning & producing offerings in-line with market demand
- Provide one-stop visibility of products’ stock up to selling time
- Identify potential collaborative selling opportunities.
- Manage centrally updated product details repository
- Monitor customer interaction data through CRM & use it for chatbot training
- Plan & schedule marketing campaigns for highest reach
- Spot cross selling opportunities factually
2. Business Intelligence in Financial Management & Accounting
- Continuous financial behavior tracking for real-time fraud detection and income management using solutions from financial partners for entrepreneurs
- Auto-analysis of credit portfolios for identifying delinquency & other relevant factors for precise credit risk prediction
- Gather & process customer feedback and usage of financial products, identifying scope of r&d on offering as well as indicating at customer churn preventive measures
- Competitive advantage through personalized product recommendation based on customer’s interest or previous purchase history
3. Business Intelligence in HR
- Auto-sort applicant resumes mapping candidate’s skill with the positional requirements
- Track performances at all levels to identify training needs and assess promotional opportunities, in an unbiased manner
- Practically observe work requirements to available bandwidth to effectively identify staffing needs
4. Business Intelligence in Customer Servicing
- Strategize referrals to retain loyal customer base while adding new ones
- Track customer interaction in real time & auto-fetch responses to common queries
- One-stop visualized insights repository to present how the product & services have been performing
- Closely monitoring competitor activities & market trends to get the customers what the others have failed to deliver
Things to Remember While Building a BI platform
The secret to making BI work for you the best is to get it tailored as per your unique requirements. However, keep in mind these basic features and add-on your USP, to make the most of your use of business intelligence :
- Put your intuitive cap on & design the navigation to your users’ convenience
- Introduce custom dashboards for specific user groups
- Make room for actionable insights & visualized reports with customizable metrics
- Instant alerts for fluctuation in metrics beyond set standards
- Built-in AI models to add up to users’ convenience
- Integration with the software & tools that are in use, for seamless operating
BinaryFolks BI Services
At BinaryFolks our core team of consultants & business intelligence developers come together to take up unique challenges that contemporary businesses struggle to overcome in their journey and plan & build BI solutions to ease their pain points to the highest probable extent ! Quick look at our service line :
[a] BI Consulting
BinaryFolks BI consultation & advisory services handhold you through the planning & strategizing phase so your project isn’t put through unpredictability.
From scrutinizing the current data management practices in your organization to a thorough market study, followed by architecture design and techstack selection, recommendation on data governance to user adoption - our BI consultants help you all along.
Talk to BinaryFolks BI Consultants
[b] BI Implementation
At BinaryFolks, we’re committed to contributing to digital success through 360° BI implementation. Starting from analyzing your business requirements to developing various BI components like data lake, warehouse, OLAP cubes, custom reporting modules, smart dashboards etc. , to QA & support, our team ensures that your business gets the best of BI !
Build BI With BinaryFolks !
What BI solution is on your mind ?
Enterprise intelligence
Customer intelligence
Brand and product intelligence
Transportation and logistics
Enterprise asset intelligence
HR Intelligence
Operational intelligence
Financial intelligence
Supply Chain Intelligence
Product Intelligence
Conclusion
The BI landscape is evolving rapidly yet consistently and with buzzwords like ‘collaborative BI’, ‘augmented analytics’ etc making their ways in the tech talks, the future looks bright indeed.Starting from IT-powered BI delivery to robust analytics that’s self-serving in nature, business intelligence has come a long way & marching way ahead. With that into consideration, BI environment has become one with the modern business systems & that makes now, the right time to join the bandwagon.
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