Insights

Business intelligence: From data to better decisions

Written by Helen Pilchenko | Nov 16, 2021

Introduction

Every day, managers make decisions that have long-term consequences. To make those decisions, executives have to understand their enterprise’s dynamics, evaluate risks, and forecast market behavior. Tools like Microsoft Power business intelligence, analyzing big data, and using big data technologies help to foresee the customer behavior and process big amounts of data.

 

McKinsey Global Institute 2020

Business intelligence is a simple way to automate data processes and improve human decision-making. Better data accelerates software delivery by ensuring that decisions are backed up by facts and data. This makes leadership and decision-making easier. 

BI is your secret weapon in product development. With business intelligence solutions, you can rely on data and customer feedback to build and maintain your product better.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is a complex combination of data mining, data tools, data visualization, and business analytics that helps companies to make data-driven decisions. Using BI to analyze data and monitor trends facilitates change, excludes inefficiencies, helps businesses to adapt to market changes. It also improves decision management at all levels.

Sources: Statista, Financial Statements of Key Players, National Statistical Offices

 

The BI processes that help companies to enhance their performance include:

  1. Data mining to use databases, data warehouses, and statistics to uncover trends.
  2. Data analysis to report and draw conclusions.
  3. Performance metrics to compare data and track progress according to goals.
  4. Descriptive and statistical analysis to explore the reasons for market behavior
  5. Data visualization to transform the collected data into visual illustrations, such as graphs and charts.
  6. Visual analytics to communicate insights and compare data sources.

The benefits of using business intelligence tools

Using BI tools offers enterprises several benefits, including consumer buying insights, improved employee productivity, performance tracking, and more. 

Leaders are empowered to make better decisions by using BI to harness better data. Better data leads to better data-driven decision-making.

Reporting: Customizable templates displaying reported data can represent financial operations, sales and marketing progress, and data sources. Automated reporting helps extract the most recent and relevant data. Then it transforms the data into easy-to-consume representations, such as charts, graphs, and dashboards. Templates can be interactive, meaning the user can enter different information and analyze the impact or outcome.

Business insights: By tracking relevant KPIs, such as employee performance, revenue, number of orders, and general turnover, you can highlight your enterprise’s strengths and weaknesses. Testing different approaches can show you what’s working and what’s not. Your business development department can then validate their decisions, considering the metrics that matter most.

Competitive analysis: Operating and managing large data volumes can provide a competitive edge. But the standard analysis doesn’t include forecasting, planning, and budgeting. Using BI tools enables easier performance planning, modification of products and services, and tracking of competitors’ sales and marketing efforts.

Data quality: To make data-driven decisions, you need to be sure of the quality of the data you use. For data to be considered high-quality it must be accurate, consistent, trustworthy, and complete. Otherwise, your enterprise could suffer from inefficiency, ineffective business decisions, missed opportunities, and financial loss. By using high-quality data, you can create a data-operating framework. That enhances communication between departments and ensures the same terminology and language is used to analyze the same data.

Customer satisfaction: Understanding customer behavior and patterns, processing customer complaints and feedback transforms into retaining old customers and gaining new ones. Repeated buying patterns and growing needs in real-time should be converted into better customer service.

  • New opportunities: External and internal market data provide information on new market trends, sales channels, business problems, and opportunities. Using BI, you can build new strategies and impact existing ones to improve customer service. You can also build new sales approaches, spot bottlenecks, and open new business opportunities. The more data you have, the more long-term forecasts you can make.
  • Operational efficiency: Having BI tools at your disposal saves the time involved in manually collecting data and creating reports. Managers can focus on ad hoc tasks instead of wasting time on tracking key metrics. BI improves overall efficiency and department performance, helps you set long-term goals and strategies, and compares results. Using BI tools can also help you make decisions faster and at the right time.
  • Cost-effectiveness: More qualified customer interviews lead to better identification of your enterprise’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, you can cut the costs of operations that don’t bring any value. You don’t have to waste your resources and can improve the processes that are effective and increase revenue. Detailed competitor analysis can also help you to draft more efficient budget strategies and, as a result, increase profit.

What are the most popular business intelligence tools and platforms?

Customized BI solutions are expensive to develop and implement. So, if you are ready to test BI tools but don’t know where to start, we recommend choosing the best ready-made solution for your needs. Here’s a short description of ready-made BI tools that could work for your enterprise.

 

Business intelligence as a service

Forte Group offers BI services that help enterprises to stay ahead of their competition and improve productivity. Working with data management can offer industry insights that impact the profitability of your enterprise. Investing in BI services provides your enterprise with the resources to extract, organize, and store data for better performance management. 

The benefits of outsourcing BI services include the following:

 

In general, outsourcing experts can help you assess the current state of your data sets, collect key metrics, and interpret results. You can then focus more on the planning of your strategy implementation.

Forte Group has extensive BI expertise and can help you at every stage of your data journey, including:

  • Data acquisition 
  • Data preparation
  • Data management and governance
  • Data quality
  • Data analysis and insights (descriptive and predictive)
  • Data visualization and presentation


We have competency and can provide support in a variety of technologies and platforms, including

 

 

Forte Group is a trusted partner for making the most out of your business intelligence

Forte Group has been developing data-driven solutions for more than 20 years. Our experts in data security and data governance prioritize a customer-oriented approach. They invest their years of experience in how BI can best help a variety of industries. 

By focusing on value, we instill a proven and scalable delivery machine. It allows the principles and practice of agile to work with the specific needs of your enterprise. We can help you manage and operate your data to bring more profit. Our specialists will recommend the best tech talents in data integration for each specific case.