Great business decisions require great insights. This is where Business Intelligence (BI) can help, allowing organisations to examine data to understand trends and derive insights necessary to make informed business decisions.
In very small companies or those starting out, spreadsheets and other ad hoc tools may initially suffice to 'get the job done'. As companies grow, the amount of data that is collected, and the decisions made from this data, also grows. New products and services, new markets and opportunities, investments in operations, sales, marketing, and other systems to support growth results in a mass of data available for business leaders to use in the decision-making process.
BI can search for, merge and query the data effortlessly, turning it into actionable information and meaningful insights for organisations.
Let's take a look at why your organisation should be looking to invest in BI.
Why do I need Business Intelligence (BI)?
BI is an umbrella term that encompasses the processes, methods, measurements, and systems used to readily view, analyse, and understand information relevant to the history, current performance, or future projections for a business. Other terms you may hear include business analytics or decision support.
The goal of BI is to help decision-makers make more informed and better choices to guide the business. BI solutions accomplish this by making it simpler to aggregate, visualise, and ‘slice-and-dice’ the data. This makes it easier to identify trends and issues, uncover new insights, and fine-tune operations to meet business goals.
Today, new technologies are making it easier to access important information about your operations, performance and most importantly, your customers.
Having the right information to make the right decisions at the right time is a simple concept, but making it happen is a comprehensive challenge. There’s a substantial amount of data that can be found in different applications, spreadsheets and even in paper-based systems.
Until a few years ago, accessing, modelling, visualising and reporting the information required by every modern business would have been out of the reach of all but the large corporates. With the recent advent of powerful self-service BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI, enterprise-grade analytics and decision support is available to every business.
Cloud technologies have driven down the costs of implementing BI solutions making them much more accessible for Small to Medium Business. Today’s BI platforms help you access your data on both traditional and mobile devices. Current technologies also simplify the process of end-users being able to customise reports and analysis data.
More than just another buzzword
There is a multitude of pain points that BI solutions can solve for organisations. BI can add value to any business, creating a comprehensive dashboard view and empowering teams to analyse their data to find efficiencies and make better day-to-day decisions.
A well-designed BI environment provides insights that enable you to make great decisions about your customers, employees and your organisation, with the capability to focus on:
- The analysis of customer behaviours, buying patterns and sales trends
- The measurement, tracking and prediction of sales and financial performance
- Tracking the performance and ROI of Marketing activities
- Budgeting and financial planning and forecasting
- Optimising operations and performance
- Marketing, web and e-commerce data analytics
- Customer relationship management
- Human Resources and Team Insights
Are Power BI dashboards and reports what your business needs?
Our software development team uses world-class Microsoft technologies to deliver Power BI solutions through SQL, SharePoint and even Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Through our approach to BI, we can help to focus on capturing accurate and timely information that allows you to make informed decisions.
Embracing BI doesn't necessarily mean you're re-inventing the wheel - Business Intelligence is often crafted from existing data sources and systems, and can be complementary to your existing software and business processes.
If you would like our assistance on harnessing the benefits of Business Intelligence, call us on 1300 307 907 or contact us via the "Let's Talk" button below.
