What are business intelligence tools?
Every single data, a lot of data is obtained by a business. Unfortunately, data without actionable insights does not allow a business to grow. Furthermore, businesses cannot interpret data without the use of business intelligence tools.
Business Intelligence tools refer to procedures and technical tools that help collect, store, and analyse data. Through these tools, businesses can analyse information and suggest long-term decisions for their growth. With insights about the present and the past and predictive insights about the future, business intelligence software can help managers, founders, and other business decision-makers plan the future course of action of a business.
Steps Performed By BI Tools
Usually, these are the steps performed by Business Intelligence tools:
- Data Preparation
- Analytical Querying of Data
- Measuring Key Performance Indicators
- Decision-Making Based On Data
BI Tools and Efficiency
Here are some ways through which business intelligence tools can help managers and other decision-makers boost business efficiency:
Increase Productivity Through Data Analytics
As a business owner, one of the challenges you may be struggling with is boosting your productivity. Thanks to data analytics, you can leverage data analytics to view insights about your data. These insights help make the necessary improvements in your business, in turn increasing productivity.
Data analytics helps provide information related to multiple aspects of your business, like order fulfilment, revenue, profitability, data comparison with visual pie charts, bar charts, line charts etc.
Finance
Business Intelligence tools like Power BI enable users to view financial information like the income statement, Cash flow and profit and loss statement. Similarly, users can prepare financial data models, merge data, and view trend charts, enabling all actionable information to be viewed through one central dashboard.
Manufacturing
When it comes to manufacturing, business intelligence tools can unlock critical data related to production orders and status, components, average lead time, order fulfilment percentage and total products produced. The manufacturing department of a company can use this data to know whether their order fulfilment and production processes are smooth and whether any changes are required.
Sales and Revenue
One of the most important parameters of a business’s success are revenue and profitability. Revenue drives the company, and there needs to be a way to measure revenue and profitability.
Through business intelligence tools, businesses can take a look at parameters like the number of units sold and buying habits and patterns. Understanding buying habits and patterns will help businesses offer better products/services to customers, helping them increase their overall level of profitability. Set KPIs for your business partners, sales team to achieve the targets and work toward the same.
Profitability
Companies can quickly take a look at their overall profitability for each week, month, quarter, year, etc., through business intelligence tools. Also check on the factors which are impeding the growth of the company.
Increase Employee Performance
Have you ever tried to determine whether there is a discrepancy between employees’ actual efforts versus billable hours?
With Business Intelligence tools, you can view this data through a single software. This helps judge whether there is a need for employees to improve their performance.
Track details like timesheet hours, view project status details, and analyse whether any improvement in employee performance is required.
Expedite business automation to save time
Since business intelligence tools involve automation, human error is reduced while analysing things like the number of units sold, revenue, etc. The reduction of human errors helps improve productivity as less time is spent going back and forth on corrections. As a result, your employees can focus on more critical tasks, saving time.
Enable Departmental Coordination
If your sales, marketing, and finance teams have data that they don’t share, you’ll hit a roadblock when it comes to efficiency.
One challenge that businesses face is the lack of coordination between different departments in the business.
With business intelligence, unify multiple departments to view insights through a centralized repository for the entire organization. When the information related to all departments is visible through one location, key decision-makers in the business can make decisions faster.
Connect With Other Applications
You can connect business intelligence tools with other optional applications to increase the visibility of all business activities in your organization. The more data is processed, the more data can be used to extract information that helps improve business processes and increase efficiency. For example, Microsoft’s Power BI software connects with business applications like Azure, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Cloud App Security.
Custom Visualisations for Visibility
Collecting data is not enough-visualisation of the data helps one interpret the data.
Microsoft’s business intelligence software tools like Power BI help transform data into formats like calendar visualisations, radar charts, aster plots, and histograms.
Conclusion
Are you ready to boost the efficiency of your business with business intelligence software tools? Refer to this page to know more about our Business Intelligence services.
