Business Intelligence (BI) is a trend you cannot ignore, and the world is proving the same by relying on BI for more than one business function. Almost every other company nowadays requires BI tools to stay in the competition and create an advantage. Despite the size and the stage of the company, BI tools offer to make more intelligent and informed business decisions and manage and analyze business data.
While the primary benefit of business intelligence tools is providing a solution suitable for your business, it is rather interesting to go through all the key benefits BI offers businesses.
Enhance Business Productivity
Business Intelligence (BI) can be crucial for increasing revenues and staying competitive. BI tools allow for faster data retrieval, storage, and organizing, minimizing the time and resources it usually takes to sort through manually. It will enable the management to access data and insights, gain a holistic view of their operations, and benchmark results with the organization's goals. With a holistic view of the organization, the management can identify all areas of opportunity and issues, which will help them in strategic decision-making. Essentially, BI optimizes business processes, enabling the streamlining of operations.
Improve Access to Crucial Information
BI platforms are designed to process heavy-duty tasks. Various BI tools are intuitive and help pull data from multiple sources into a data warehouse, then analyze it according to user queries, simple reports, and dashboards. With all this information available from one centrally located source, businesses can be more responsive to the changes in the marketplace.
Boost ROI
BI systems offer countless methods for increasing operational efficiencies. But there is enough proof that BI can dramatically impact an organization's revenue growth. It ensures more substantial ROI as organizations can significantly reduce costs, enhance revenue, improve margin, drive cost avoidance, and much more. The most tangible benefit of BI from a revenue perspective is the reduction of labor costs. The amount of time and effort that can be saved with automation is genuinely sizable. Furthermore, the reduction in IT costs is a boon too. Tool consolidation, automation and cloud-based infrastructure have a substantial positive impact on revenues.
While the above is tangible, BI also influences the improvements in business and process efficiency, employee productivity, customer satisfaction, etc., which are linked to a positive impact on an organization's revenue.
Fuel Strategic Decision-Making
According to a report by Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations $15 million annually! Inaccurate data can cost the company a lot more than just revenue.
BI can arm organizations with rich data resources to help them achieve their business goals and targets by guiding timely strategic decisions. Reporting based on accurate and timely information helps organizations measure the performance of their practices and processes. BI helps organizations make informed decisions on strategic issues by providing crucial information on the current and historical performance of the company along with future trends, expected demands, customer behavior, etc.
Nowadays, businesses can sharpen their decision-making ability with AI and ML, a part of most BI tools. AI can help create live dashboards to analyze processes and operations in real time instead of relying solely on historical data. For example, with predictive analysis, a resort can accurately forecast footfall during the holiday season to maximize occupancy.
Eliminate Waste
A lesser talked about benefit of BI is the reduction of waste. Waste can be defined as anything that is not adding value to an organization. This includes administrative and operations work that can be automated with BI tools. BI systems can accurately pinpoint areas of waste that mostly go unnoticed. More unnoticed waste means less productivity and a negative impact on revenue. All the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in manufacturing, operations, human resources, sales, and IT departments can be looked into and streamlined.
BI tools help the management get a more comprehensive view of the organization's performance and locate areas of waste. They can identify the root causes of issues and eliminate them immediately.
Identify Opportunities
Richard Branson, a business magnate and entrepreneur, once said, "business opportunities are like buses; there is always another one coming." However, no one likes to miss the bus. Similarly, organizations would want to take advantage of every business opportunity. They would like to stay ahead of it.
A large portion of research in BI has been on solutions that can answer questions related to the future. This is where the AI and ML tools help with predictive analysis. Of late, solutions enabling predictive analysis are gaining much traction. It can analyze existing and historical data to understand customers and products/services. These solutions are invaluable to organizations of all sizes and can help them identify potential opportunities.
Like the example cited earlier, hospitality businesses can use these systems to predict the number of guests they expect in a given night or season. Doing so can help them to determine prices while maximizing the occupancy of their rooms and increasing revenue at the same time.
Organizations must make informed decisions in a highly competitive world to enhance their performance and stay ahead of the competition. A robust BI strategy plays a crucial role in making this happen. Business Intelligence has become a must for organizations of all types. BI is for everyone, whether a start-up, small enterprise, or large organization.
There are a few more aspects of BI that need your attention. We will detail them out in the next blog, stay tuned!
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