Using Business Intelligence (BI) tools gives an organization the opportunities to access and analyze datasets and then present analytical findings in maps, charts, graphs, dashboards, summaries, and reports. That is why taking advantage of business intelligence advisors makes sense to reap the best BI tools.
According to 360Suite, the global business intelligence adoption rate was 26 percent as of 2020.
What is Business Intelligence and Its Current Trends
Business intelligence is often described as a range of tools that offer quick and easy-to-digest access to insights about the organizations’ current state according to available data. Reporting is BI’s central facet, while the dashboard is the archetypical BI tool.
Below are current trends brought by custom business intelligence solutions:
- Artificial intelligence for high accuracy in anomaly detection
- Secondly, data security that focuses on building response and detection responsibilities
- Data visualization that brings business value
- SaaS BI for more access and flexibility in cloud data
- Predictive and prescriptive analytics tools
- Lastly, Collaborative BI in addressing new business challenges
What Business Intelligence Features Help An Organization
BI tools are helpful for organizations to maximize their revenue streams and stay competitive. More and more companies nowadays use BI tools to manage, analyze and visualize data.
What are the benefits of Business Intelligence for an Organization?
According to business intelligence advisors some of the benefits of BI are follow:
- Predictive Analytics – This feature extracts information from available datasets to forecast future possibilities.
- Operational Efficiency – With detailed daily events summary, organizations get the necessary information to make critical operational decisions
- Increasing Revenues – The collected data can help organizations ask better questions and also, compare the things that happened across various dimensions to determine sales weaknesses.
- Predicting Market Trends – BI tools help businesses to predict new opportunities and leverage external data with internal ones to identify recent sales trends.
- Identifying Problems Beforehand – BI tools enable organizations to forecast potential problems and as a result, stay ahead of the competition.
Using Predictive Analytics for the Decision-Making Process
With predictive analytics, organizations can employ historical and real-time data mining to predict results. In return, they can make well-informed decision-making.
According to the 2017 Dresner Advisory Services study, 80% of enterprises consider in-database analytics and in-memory analytics the most crucial predictive analytics platforms.
Improving Operational Efficiency Using BI
Business intelligence plays a critical role in business planning and strategy. It improves their operational efficiency by measuring key performance indicators, identifying consumer insights, and performing quantitative analyses.
Organizations can also enhance their cybersecurity while improving their understanding of market trends.
Business Intelligence Role for Increasing Revenues
Through the BI dashboards, users can have better means of gathering more significant insights into the business. Moreover, the data collected are used by the marketing and sales team to improve their strategies for increasing revenues.
Below are several ways how organizations can increase their revenues using BI according to business intelligence advisors:
- Determine and focus on higher-profit customers
- Measure the marketing programs effects
- Increase the sales forecast accuracy
Beating the Competition by Predicting Market Trends
Businesses are looking for effective ways to stay competitive take advantage of BI tools. With BI, they can manage specific datasets that allow them to generate meaningful insights. These tools are consist of critical features, such as data visualization, visual analytics, interactive dashboards, and KPI scorecards that are utilized to predict market trends and beat the competition.
Identifying Business Problems Beforehand
Organizations use BI tools to identify business problems beforehand by collecting essential data. They will then develop effective business strategies. Most BI tools connect all data across the organizations, so predicting any anomaly or issue is quick and easy. Besides, data warehousing and real-time data help in accessing the latest information for better decision-making.
Why Do You Need Business Intelligence Advisors
Business intelligence advisors’ role is to use technology to help enterprises extract, prepare, and refine data from external and internal data sources they can use for making business decisions.
BI advisors provide ideas on how businesses improve their processes based on the available data. Then, they will use the collected data to anticipate future developments and events. Below are other roles of BI advisors:
- Monitor data storage and document various work processes
- Develop procedures and policies for data analysis and collection
- Identify or collect new data processing programs
- Lastly, Reporting with data analysis
EPCGroup Approach for Business Intelligence Using Microsoft Power BI
EPCGroup is one of the leading business intelligence consulting companies in the industry. They use Power BI’s capabilities to help businesses improve, maintain, and manage their data while creating new opportunities. They combine responsive Power BI support with strategic guidance and proactive data management to increase efficiency, savings, profits, and competitive advantage.
Below are other EPCGroup’s Power BI approaches:
- Deep Dive Calls – EPCGroup uses deep-dive calls to explore a problem, a situation, and an idea.
- Customized Approach – The BI advisors use a customized approach to ensure that their solutions best suit the organization’s needs.
- BI Roadmap – The BI advisors ensure a clear roadmap to ensure everything is on the right track.
Kick-off and Deep Dive Calls with Management on Challenges, Requirement Analysis, and Recommendations
Through kick-off and deep-dive calls along with challenges, requirements analysis, and recommendations, organizations can think of the best possible solution for the problems they encounter.
Additionally, they can use this technique with Power BI to brainstorm, engage in idea creation and conduct a thorough and extensive investigation. That is even more effective due to accurate data collection.
Creating Design Documents, Functional Specifications, and Adopting A Customized Approach for Business Intelligence Implementation
Design document creation, functional specifications, and customized approach are helpful in BI implementation. These things ensure that organizations can get the expected benefits of BI. Consequently, businesses will have the broadest picture encompassing the market perspective and internal operations.
How to Create a Business Intelligence Roadmap
BI implementation and strategy can be challenging without a clear roadmap according to the assessment, feasibility, and priority. Below are the steps on the BI roadmap:
- Identify the opportunities, pitfalls, and trends
- Secondly, figure out the stakeholder objectives
- Involve governance, data integrity, knowledge transfer, and actual implementation
- Assess the current situation
- Clean the data
- Develop an agreement on definitions
- Choose the right tool
- Lastly, Pursue an interactive approach
Business Intelligence FAQ
Q: What are the different business intelligence techniques?
A: Common BI functions include querying, data mining, data preparation, reporting, benchmarking, statistics analytics, descriptive analytics, and also, data visualization
Q: What are the different business intelligence tools?
A: Different business intelligence tools include Microsoft Power BI, online analytical processing, ad hoc analysis, mobile BI, operational BI, SaaS BI, open-source BI, collaborative BI, data visualization, and location intelligence
Q: What is the difference between business analytics and business intelligence?
A: Business analytics deals with analyzing only the past data to drive existing needs, while business intelligence advisors uses both the past and present data to drive business needs.
Conclusion
Business intelligence can transform data into actionable insights that help many organizations make strategic business decisions. That is even more efficient if organizations consider BI advisors like EPCGroup.
