Want to implement Business Intelligence?

It doesn’t mean that you can just sit back and take it easy, but it will help protect you from the maelstrom of unconsolidated data overload and business inefficiency.

Welcome to the world of Business Intelligence (BI). As you read you may find our Basic BI Terminology page useful. Business Intelligence is about really knowing what’s happening within your business. It’s about using BI technology and business know how to bring order to the masses of data that your organisation collects and stores and turning it into valuable information for decision making. You can then leverage that information for competitive advantage, to solve root cause problems, to improve customer service, and to increase efficiency and a whole raft of other things. This is what you can achieve when you practice Business Intelligence.

Many business people in growing organisations experience frustration. You may know that your company holds important data but you can’t get to it. Sometimes you may be able to reach the data but it’s not joined up in a way that you can use. Some organisations also waste time and money importing and manipulating their data through manual processes that can be prone to user error. Business Intelligence seeks to address all these issues.

Ultimately you will use your Business Intelligence system to develop Business Analytics. Business Analytics are very clever reports and here are a few examples of some typical things that Business Analytics with Business Intelligence can help your organisation realise:

• Implement dashboards and scorecards so that executives have easy and timely visibility of key performance indicators (KPIs) and managers can quickly recognise operational exceptions that are veering off target
• Define, implement and monitor performance metrics and make corrective actions if they fall outside of agreed value ranges
• Understand your customer churn so that targeted retention campaigns can be developed to retain customers
• Identify customers that have reduced their purchase levels in order to position offers to increase their spend again
• Identify your top-selling products and compare those product sales across all your distribution channels
• Determine the inventory level of a product or item in your supply chain, the reasons for returned products, and orders that were not fulfilled
• Compare departmental employee turnover to identify potential morale problems, understand training gaps, and the full cost of losing an employee

As you realise these BI benefits you achieve success and your organisation continues to grow and so consequently does the data that you collect. But because making sense of that data is the function of Business Intelligence it will maintain order in a world that could have become data chaos. BI will continue to turn raw data into highly valuable information on a regular basis to aid your business decision making. It keeps you in control, reducing the risk of burning valuable energy in fire-fighting due to uninformed business decisions. With Business Intelligence you’re no longer guessing what is going on in your department, you know, and you have timely information to prove it.

There are several technologies available to help you realise Business Intelligence. We hope that you will enjoy your visit here and come back often.