6 Key Benefits of Business Intelligence Solutions
Business technology has advanced and business intelligence solutions can now benefit virtually any organization. Keep reading to learn the ways BI software can enhance your business.
Call it Business Intelligence, BI, or Big Data, the simple fact is that business intelligence solutions are now vital to effectively running a business. While there used to be terms associated with large enterprises up until fairly recently, as BI technology has advanced, deployment, licensing, and support options have increased making it more affordable for organizations of all sizes. But the question you may be asking is, “Why do I need BI?”.
Virtually any business can benefit from BI. Some specific issues or scenarios that are good indicators a BI discussion should take place are:
- The need to integrate data from multiple business applications or data sources
- Data visibility: The ability to see operational, financial, and other data
- Data accessibility: The ability to utilize and access that data quickly and effectively
- Changing user needs: more users accessing data and more end-users needing analytics
- Rapid company growth or a recent or pending merger/acquisition
- Introduction of new products
- Upgrades within the IT environment
Regardless of size, a BI Solution can provide key benefits to any organization. Take a look at the 6 key ways your company can benefit from business intelligence solutions:
Share information more efficiently
BI makes it easy for everyone to access and analyze up-to-date information anytime, anywhere, regardless of their user role. Everyone throughout the company can make better decisions, faster.
Empower your people
Providing employees with access to analytical data that is readily available and understandable allows them to work more effectively and support the overall business strategy.
Simplify processes
Having a single, central location for your data allows you to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs), access reports, analyze your data, and share documents. All of the functional areas are aligned to articulate strategies, set objectives, and monitor the organization’s performance so you can make better informed and timely decisions that support your overall business strategy.
Gain insights
Analyze your business performance and opportunities on a deeper level with intuitive data at your fingertips to enable smarter strategic and tactical decisions.
Deliver meaningful analysis and reporting
Readily track and analyze KPIs against key business goals to gain a better understanding of how your business is performing today, and when changes are needed to impact performance.
Enable growth
Many companies rely solely on the most widely used BI tool, the Excel spreadsheet. While Excel offers many useful features such as graphs, charts, and pivot tables which assist in decision-making, it doesn’t scale to your business. Also, compiling data from multiple, disparate databases is time-consuming and is prone to errors. While Excel is still a key cog of any good BI Solution, it remains only a part of one. For real growth a total BI Solution is necessary.
To learn more about the value of BI, best practices to empower your team, or transforming your business processes with business intelligence tools read our free Better Business Analytics with BI eBook.
