Executive Summary
Human-driven data processing and analysis is slow, inefficient and expensive, but getting the most out of your data is an absolute necessity. Business intelligence leverages cutting-edge digital tools to automatically capture and manage your data, giving you new insights into your firm’s past, present and future operations, revealing opportunities for both optimization and growth. We explore how business intelligence tools can provide unprecedented visibility into your organization’s processes, and how the opportunities these new views can provide.
What is Business Intelligence?
Your business produces a huge amount of data every day, but raw data cannot be used to support decisions. Business intelligence(BI) is the process of taking all the data behind your enterprise, every project, sale, customer and employee, every dollar you spent and every movement of the market around you, analyzing it, and turning it into knowledge that empowers you. BI combines all of your data: external, internal, past, present and future, to give you deep insights into your business from all angles. BI reveals trends in your rivals and customers, explores new market segments, and enables fine measurement of your operation’s efficiency.
The Advantage of Business Intelligence
BI is a process that involves your entire enterprise. Useful data exists in, and must be mined from all areas of your business, internal and external. Custom APIs pull facts and figures from your inventory and supply chains, industry and market data, key process information (production, servicing, fulfillment and/or customer information), interaction and transaction logs, and more. With a complementary suite of APIs to wrangle (reformat, organize and import) your key data, BI tools can leverage machine learning and predictive analysis models tuned to handle your particular big data to model all the complex interdependencies that make up your business.
Once your business’ data is extracted, organized and analyzed, only half the work is done. All that processed information is still useless unless and until it’s effectively communicated to you and your key people. Many datasets are compressed into key performance indicators that allow you to feel your business out with just one glance. A full set of data views and visualizations can ensure you always have all the data you need to assess your business in light of your strategic priorities and goals. BI also leverages predictive analytics to grant you deeper hindsight and foresight, and increased agility, using your own data, machine learning and statistical analysis to identify different likely outcomes based on past and future decisions. This type of analysis can improve your profitability in a wide range of ways, from optimizing your pricing strategies in response to customer demands, to measuring the impact of every dollar you spend on marketing. It also offers insights that allow you to predict your customers’ behaviors, and capitalize on opportunities for up- and cross-sells, expansion and growth, and high-ROI marketing initiatives.
The Advantage of Business Intelligence
While we can make implementing BI initiatives into your operations easy, it takes a well-developed and robust digital strategy to fully support them. BI isn’t software you invest in and forget about, nor is it a solution that removes the need for imaginative, enterprising leadership. Just like the rest of your operations, BI relies on your hard work and dedication. BI empowers your entire business, both its systems and its personnel, with knowledge. Without time wasted on obsolete human-driven data analysis: muddling through spreadsheets, putting together slideshows, manually compiling datasets, you have all the time you need to focus on planning and strategy. We can help you put together your plan of attack: defining your digital strategy, designing custom solutions to give you the perfect picture of your business’ status, and providing you with implementations to access, analyze, process and visualize all the data. Connect with us today to get started.
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