Business Intelligence

The Benefits of Using Business Intelligence

Today’s digital world means that all business dealings are recorded in data in some way, shape or form. The resultant ‘big data’ – a totally overwhelming seas of zeroes and ones – is impossible to understand and interpret without the proper tools. Business intelligence systems provide those tools. They are capable of either organizing or sifting through the sea of data that modern day businesses generate and offering up insights that are hidden within.

This enables organizations who utilize business intelligence systems to do a number of things that other businesses simply cannot.

BI can help your company:

• Quickly Identify and Cultivate New Opportunities
  BI can position your business for opportunity by helping you understand the demographics of a potential region and if that aligns with your target customer base, strengthen a pitch to an investor by sharing accurate data on your company and previous performance, or identify new customers within your market and analyze their greatest needs and interests. Data can help you hone in on potential customers and sales regions with more accuracy and intentionality.

• Recognize and Improve Areas of Inefficiency
  BI can help you identifying systemic and procedural issues. Without a BI system to make sense of the data, it is very hard for a business to identify that there in fact is a problem to solve, let alone what the problem is, how extensive it is, and how it might be solved. For example, a shipping company might know that their delivery process could be fine-tuned because they’re receiving complaints from customers. With the help of BI, however, the company might discover that the delay is always for a particular product or that a particular transport company is responsible for the majority of delays. They can then use that information to resolve the problem area and proactively find ways to improve their delivery system. Additionally, they could proactively track data on delivery times in order to avoid a poor customer experience in the first place.

• Have Proactive Visibility and Control Over Day-to-Day Business Operations
  With access to business intelligence, you can easily and regularly assess branch, regional, and market performance to keep a pulse on any issues that arise or areas of opportunity.

• Gain Deep Insights Into Customer Behavior
  By better understanding how your customers interact with your organization, you’ll be better placed to cater to those customers. For example, BI can help you understand if certain pages on your website or forms have a higher abandonment rate, if your customer demographic has changed, or their preferred way to contact you. Analytics about your customer can teach you about all of these things and more to increase loyalty, spend, and to optimize your customer experience. By better understanding how your customers interact with your organization, you’ll be better placed to cater to those customers.

• Make Decisions More Quickly
  Having access to real-time data through business intelligence systems helps you minimize the guesswork and gambles that are often involved in decision-making for your business. If it’s in the data, you don’t have to debate it. The right business intelligence system will be able to respond quickly and accurately to almost any business-related query so that you can gain buy-in by sharing the data with your team and make decisions more quickly and confidently.

• Identify Areas for Cost-Cutting
  BI helps businesses cut costs by improving inventory efficiency by identifying low turn-over or idle products, optimizing purchasing, and measuring inefficiencies in procedural systems or employee costs. In NewVantage Partners’ 2018 study 60.9% of companies surveyed said that they successfully reduced costs using BI.

• Set and Track Goals More Effectively
  BI helps you set and track your goals for any department or employee more accurately and efficiently. Before setting a goal, you can have a clear idea of the KPIs involved in order to give a department or employee specific areas where they can improve or grow. With access to very specific data around your goals, you can chart the course for your company more intentionally, giving employees more direction, ownership, and understanding of how to take action toward your company’s vision.

• Improve Data Collection, Storage, and Governance
  Instead of drowning in your data, business intelligence systems allow for centralized and uniform data collection, storage, and access. With a well governed business intelligence system, more of your data is available for analysis, and processes can more easily be put into place to manage access to your data and mitigate risk.

• Access Current, Accurate, and Uniform Data
  BI systems allow you to have access to current data that can be trusted by all employees. With an effective business intelligence system that has self-service access, you won’t have to rely on your IT department to complete a report for you before you can make a decision. You can have timely reports at your fingertips with assurance that the data will be accurate and uniform across the organization.

• Easily Visualize Data
  With data visualization capabilities in BI systems, employees can more easily understand and communicate the meaning behind the data (even employees who aren’t data analysts). The brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than text and visuals prove to be more convincing to people. By using data visualization, people will understand the data more easily and be more motivated than ever before to take action. The best BI systems make business data available in the form of graphs, charts, reports, maps and dashboards. If your employees don’t currently have the ability to explore and manipulate your data through the use of data visualization tools, this is a game-changer for getting the most value possible out of your data. (Read our blogpost called “How and Why Visualizing Data Makes it Actionable” for more on why visualizing data makes a difference.)

• Analyze and Improve Employee Performance
  BI systems give employees instant access to the data they need to do their jobs, and to do their jobs better. Just like BI helps you set more specific goals for your business, BI systems can also help employees track their own performance and set more specific goals. For example, your sales department could use analytics to understand what current sales methods are most effective and all reps could be asked to implement those methods and track the effect that has on their performance. BI can also help in simple ways like giving employees a way to tell with data if they have contributed to less customer complaints or better customer experience.

Business intelligence won’t make the big business decisions for you, but it will give you the information you need to make those decisions more confidently and accurately.

How to Assess if Your Company Needs a BI Solution

Despite all the benefits, not every company needs a new BI solution. In some cases your company may be able to gain the information they need without implementing a BI solution, or your current solution may be sufficient. With that in mind, we wanted to share some questions to help you assess what you might do with a BI solution as well as some tell-tale signs that your company does indeed need BI.

Questions to Ask When Assessing Your Company’s BI Needs:

Businesses are recognizing the many perks that come with having limitless information through data but prioritizing what to do with that data can be a difficult task. By answering these questions with leadership you’ll have a clear idea of how much of a priority BI is for your business:

• What do I want to accomplish for my company?
  Before deciding whether or not you need BI, make sure that you have a clear understanding of your business’s overarching goals so that you can assess how BI will fit in with the larger plan for your business.

• How do I plan to utilize BI?
  Discuss specific goals and areas you could use it to improve your business processes. What problems are being experienced on a regular basis that need resolution and that we need more information about in order to find a solution? These are areas where BI could help.

• What types of data can I collect to use to my advantage?
  This often looks like noting all of the questions that you can’t answer or can’t find supporting data for as relates to your company’s performance, customers, competitors, or market.

• What are the pros and cons of investing in BI for my company?

• Will I get a return on my investment?
  If this question seems difficult to answer, your company can start tracking key statistics like- How many hours does IT currently spend fulfilling requests for reports? How often do employees have to navigate through multiple applications in order to seek out certain information and act on it? What abilities and opportunities are we currently sacrificing by not investing more in business intelligence? Or what might be lost if your company doesn’t improve in certain areas? If you’re looking for more on assessing ROI of a BI solution, download our e-book with more on the basics of BI here.

• Is my company focusing more currently on data defense or data offense?
  Data defense is all about minimizing risk and maximizing data security, whereas data offense focuses on using data proactively to grow the organization. With that in mind, would investing in BI be worth it and help you accomplish your data strategy? (89% of companies surveyed by NewVantage in 2020 are investing in BI offensively, rather than defensive reasons like cost cutting or regulation.)

• What will every level of employee use BI for?
  Consider mapping out how a BI solution could be used in each department and by every employee, from leadership to sales to customer representatives. Discuss what tasks specifically could benefit from using BI on all levels of your organization.

• Is your company culture conducive to making decisions based on the data, not relying on gut-feel, intuition, or rank alone to make decisions?
  Is leadership already advocating for more data-driven decision-making and implementing better analytics strategies, or are they resisting becoming more data-driven? Beginning to rely heavily on data instead of gut-feel or experience is reportedly a struggle for many companies, but the best way to approach this change is to view it as adding insight to experience, not replacing experience with data. Data will only help you clarify what you need to do next and why, and your experience will help you think of possible solutions based on the data. If leadership is ready to focus on BI, our blogpost here shares concrete steps on how to lead your company toward a data-driven culture.

If you can’t clearly pinpoint what value your data is currently providing to your company, you most likely could be doing more with your data and would benefit from a BI solution. Here are a few other signs that your data could be doing more for you or you could be doing more with your data:

Signs Your Company Needs a BI Solution

• Only a few people have access to the data. If only a few people have access to the data, then only a few people can use it to make more informed business decisions.

• You have some data but still have a lot of questions that you can’t answer with it. For example, your data might tell you what the problem is, but you might not be able to dive deep enough to find what's causing that problem.

• Requests for data or reports are still going through your IT department. This puts more responsibility on IT and increases the amount of time employees have to wait to have access to actionable insights. It also greatly reduces the likelihood that employees will ask for reports or information as often as they would if they had self-service access to your data.

• Your data requires manual processing. Up-to-date BI systems are designed to automate data processing, saving countless hours spent on manual processing.

• Your company has changed or grown significantly. Your BI solution might not address all of the components of what your company does now that you have grown or changed direction. A new solution could help you reduce inefficiencies and unify any new tasks and functions of your business under one program. 

Creating a company that relies on data and truly uses data to their advantage with BI starts with a clear commitment from leadership and is only successful with a clear vision and accountability for how the solution will be used.

Have Questions About BI or Ready to Get Going?

If your company is ready to take the next step and invest in a BI solution, team CSG would love to help develop and implement a BI solution that will clearly help you establish a competitive advantage and optimize every facet of your operations. Click below to get started or to ask a question about how BI could benefit your company.