Business Intelligence: Tools and Processes - How BI Tools Can Help Improve Your Business?

Business intelligence (BI) refers to the strategies, technologies, and applications used by enterprises for data collection, analysis, integration, and presentation of business information. 
The purpose of BI technologies is to support better business decision-making and to provide historical, current and futuristic views of business operations.

Business intelligence tools and software: Learn how business intelligence tools can help improve your business.

Business Intelligence: Tools and Processes - How BI Tools Can Help Improve Your Business?

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of systems, processes, strategies, tools, and technologies used by organizations or companies to analyze business information data and convert raw data into useful information that leads to profitable business processes. 

Business intelligence tools provide current, historical and predictive views of business processes and enable users of different positions within the company or End-Users to collect, store and analyze company data to help guide company decisions.

Most companies in the world seek to increase their competitiveness, or at least stay in the competition and try to find more innovative ways to attract customers, by providing new and good services. 
This hard work requires quick decisions, based on an instantaneous vision of the company as a whole. 
The moment of the availability of the right information reduces a lot of time for decision-makers.

Most large companies have a range of resources such as systems, infrastructure, customers and other important components, while IT solutions play a key role in integrating all sources with each other and these solutions can be built using different technologies.

How Does Business Intelligence Work?

6 Steps to Business Intelligence Testing

Six Steps to Successful Business Intelligence (BI) may include:

1. Less is more - do not try to boil the ocean.
2. Set your targets and measure your goals.
3. Set parameters on data and content.
4. Identify and recognize the resource availability.
5. Identify measurements that reflect your business.
6. Ensure flexibility and longevity in your system

What is the Process of Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) is about making better decisions within your business and guiding them through data analysis. 

Business Intelligence tools connect to different data sources (Flat files, Databases, Web, etc) and extract data of interest, and then analyze this data and convert it to information in the form of graphs and dashboards that help the businessmen understand the current situation of the company.

The overall purpose of business intelligence is to achieve company and management goals. It is not just the work of a set of reports and graphs that interact with each other. 

It is important that these reports answer specific questions that ultimately aim to guide the decisions of the company and employees to achieve the best possible performance through the available data.

You can use business intelligence solutions and tools to analyze any company activity, for example, monitoring sales performance. You can imagine that you live in a water-filled environment (data).

Business intelligence tools are a boat with fairly limited possibilities that enable you to sail and explore amazing things (information and insights into the current state of the company).

Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI)

Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) or self-service analytics is a relatively new approach to data analysis that enables End-users to access and perform data analytics on their own and deploy their queries, reports, and analyses within an architecture supported by business departments in the organization even if they do not have a background in information technology, statistical analysis, business intelligence or data mining. 
It means that there is often no need for a specialist to work on these BI tools, but the decision-maker himself can deal and learn these tools and begin to analyze data and guide decisions. 
Most of these solutions are based on the point and click concept of doing things.

Business Intelligence Services

Business groups are in dire need of intelligent reports and analysis tools for data and information. The more data within an organization, the greater the need for such reports and tools.

Decision-makers within organizations face many problems and challenges that require a faster and more specialized way to help them make decisions. 

Business intelligence tools and BI programs, based on partnerships with the world's leading business intelligence software such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, can address these types of challenges.

Some important business intelligence services may include:

• Data Discovery
• Classify data and create data warehousing
• Purification and revision of data
• Analytical study of customer requirements
• Set KPIs for business
• Set KPIs based on client wishes and requirements
• Build the logical data layer in the data warehouse
• Data mining
• Select appropriate data collection methods for market research 
• Build transfer tools

Business intelligence tools and techniques

How Business Intelligence Tools Can Help Improve Your Business?

Business intelligence solutions and tools are as important to startups as they are, to large and medium-sized companies.  
According to a report by Dresner Advisory Services, the main reason, why small businesses use business intelligence solutions, is to make better decisions.

Companies can utilize BI tools in many areas such as project performance monitoring, financial analysis, employee performance analysis, and other analytical reports.

Let us review the importance of using business intelligence solutions and tools for the companies in their various activities:

Improve Sales and Marketing

A customer is the lifeblood of any company. The more you know about your customers such as their buying interest, their geographic or demographic distribution, the more it helps to increase sales, to anticipate demand for products and improve targeting in marketing campaigns.

In the sales world, the most profitable customer is not the best-selling invoice in the company, but the most frequent customer is the most loyal customer of the company.

Business intelligence tools help categorize customers based on the frequency of their procurement and purchases or based on their contribution to the overall profit of the company to determine the best customers and identify the lowest. 

BI tools help the company select loyal customers and meet their desires better, increase their loyalty to the company and target similar customers with marketing campaigns.

According to Marketing Metrics - a book for a manager's guide to measuring marketing performance, "The probability of selling to existing customers ranges from 60% to 70%, while the probability of selling to new customers ranges from 5% to 20%."
For example, in the retail sector, the historical sales of a particular customer can be analyzed as his interest in purchasing and targeting the marketing of products similar to his previous purchasing interest.

BI tools also help you analyze and evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns and maximize the revenue from your campaign or so-called Return on Investment (ROI), you can analyze the sources with which people come or interact with the marketing campaign to customize targeting.

You may know that a particular product group is sold in a given period frequently by focusing on a marketing campaign to target customers with the same product purchasing interests in that period. 
Using BI tools, you can guide sales representatives to target customers who are really interested in doing business with the company and focusing their efforts on that.

BI tools also help you predict sales. Forrester reports indicate that the field of predictive analytics is becoming increasingly widespread and that tools are easier for companies than ever before, as there is a difference between analysis and anticipation or forecasting.

Cost Efficiency and Reduction

You can easily know what is draining your finances, what is the most expensive part of the company? 

By analyzing your company's cost lines to explore items where costs can be reduced. For example, a company can look at the stock and see what products are most in-demand and what are the least sold and stagnated products in the company's stores (Deadstock), to reduce them and thus reduce the cost of storage. 

Business intelligence tools show you where you can reduce your costs. You can also reduce the cost of purchases by choosing the best supplier based on past vendor transactions.

Improve Human Resource Management (HRM)

The term called Human Resource Business Intelligence (HRBI) or simply HR Business Intelligence means business intelligence tools in the field of human resources.

A report by Deloitte indicates that 71% of companies see the analysis of data on human resources and people as a very important part of the company.

Business intelligence tools enable you to do a lot of analysis, extract a lot of information for employees, evaluate their performance, and perform many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on a daily basis, such as how much each employee contributes to the company's sales or the company's overall performance year after year, or the so-called Year-over-year (YOY). 

BI tools can help you do a lot of data analysis of when and why employees require to leave, see the percentage of areas where employees apply for the company and compare employee performance in departments and between departments.

OrangeHRM (a HR software company) provides a system that helps decision-makers in the recruitment process. 
The system collects and analyzes information from social networks using Watson Analytics about the applicant.

Employee retention: BI tools can be used to analyze employee behaviors to differentiate and know the loyal employees of the company compared to those who are willing to leave the company. 
This is useful for knowing what helps employees stay or leave the company.

Conclusion

Business intelligence tools are meant to collect, analyze and present the Company's data, which may be financial or non-financial. 
The general purpose of this process is to help the decision-making process become information based on a clear vision of the company's situation.

If you want to have a comprehensive assessment and instant insight into the company's various activities, BI tools are the perfect choice for you.

Anyone in the company can use business intelligence tools to handle data and make different reports and interact with each other to answer questions of interest and dive into more and more details, without the need for specialists and programmers in complex languages ​​and ways to create various reports for you.