in Blog

September 19, 2019

8 Problems Solved by Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions

Author:




Edwin Lisowski

CSO & Co-Founder


Reading time:




7 minutes


Business intelligence (BI) is a way for your business to move to the next level and to develop, and that’s not the first time we talk about this. We have already shared our knowledge about business intelligence best practices, tools and solutions. Now you know how to implement business intelligence, but you still may be wondering what issues it may help you to solve. That’s why we are here — read this article to understand how exactly business intelligence services can make your life easier.

What problems can Business Intelligence solutions solve?

Business intelligence (BI) can solve numerous problems, and here are some of them:

1. Business Intelligence solutions: Access to the data is limited

Business intelligence reports are usually based on huge datasets. So imagine that you have no BI software implemented, only loads of data to analyze. Will you share it with, for instance, your business partners? We doubt so — they won’t waste their time on trying to understand an enormous dataset. But business intelligence can solve the problem of limited access to the data. By turning loads of information into a clear and short report, it allows easy and fast sharing. You can provide anyone with such a report: your business partners, managers, executives, members of the technical department, etc. Anyone can get access and check the report using their smartphone, at any time.

So you won’t have to worry that someone is not informed about something, and is not able to take part in the decision-making process.

2. Performance management is far from perfection

Use your imagination one more time — imagine that a year ago you released an innovative product. The product itself has prospects, and everything seems to be fine. But even after a year, you haven’t reached the desired result, and the sales are pretty low. Something is going wrong, and the reason may arise from poor performance management. With business intelligence software, you can gain a much deeper understanding of your company’s performance and potential opportunities.

As a result, you will be able to identify all the bottlenecks and make proper decisions to solve the problems. In turn, efficient performance management will increase your company’s chances for success. Implementing business intelligence services has rather high ROI, so don’t be afraid of investing in the software.

3. Business Intelligence solutions: Creating multiple systems takes too much time

Making decisions usually involves analyzing data from multiple resources. Without business intelligence solutions, you will have to get data from each of them, then combine everything together and, finally, move to the reporting stage. And only then you will be able to start the decision-making process. Creating multiple systems takes too much time and effort, but there is a way to save these precious resources, and spend them on something more important. Business intelligence solutions allow building a centralized data warehouse, while creating reports becomes extremely fast and easy.

Therefore, you will be able to spend the time saved on making efficient decisions. This is a serious advantage of business intelligence solutions, especially in the case you have an enormous number of sources with loads of data in each of them.

4. Only tech teams can develop custom reports

A lot of traditional tools that allow analyzing data and reporting are too complicated, so usually only tech teams are able to use them properly. And this is not the only problem in this case — every time you need a report, you will have to delegate this task to your tech department. This means another waste of time. Instead, business intelligence tools are much easier to use.

Many of them are equipped with manuals, videos, and even live training to help your team members to understand how they work. We have already mentioned our article about tools, remember? You will definitely find there something suitable for you and your team. And things can get even easier in case you decide to create a personalized business intelligence solutions. It will perfectly fit your requirements, so it will be even more simple for your workers to work with it.

You may also find it interesting – Business Intelligence best practices.

5. Business Intelligence solutions: Day-to-day operations are not organized

Dealing with numerous types of data in your everyday operations can easily turn into a chaotic disaster. Just imagine: sales and performance metrics are in different reports, financial data is in separate spreadsheets, and so on. If you have to deal with such a disorder every day, you can easily get lost and miss important pieces of data. Thanks to business intelligence solutions, you can develop a central location, where all the data will be organized.

Therefore, every member of your team will experience no problems when monitoring key performance indicators, analyzing the data, and sharing the reports. Understanding these reports will also be very easy — the format of business intelligence reports is very user-friendly.

6. Your clients prefer your competitors

That’s probably the worst problem any business can experience — losing customers. And if you are not the only company in your market niche, this can be very dangerous. Your clients will simply move to your competitors, and, as a result, your profits will significantly decrease. The main reason for such an issue is that you don’t understand your customers’ behavior. You don’t know exactly what they want, and how they can behave in the future.

Gathering relevant data and analyzing it can help, but it takes time, and in certain cases, the time is extremely precious. Business intelligence can solve both of these problems: the report will be delivered quickly, so you will be able to get to know your clients better. Understanding them will allow you to improve your business strategy and, therefore, increase your existing customers’ loyalty and attract new clients. If you make them happy, they won’t choose your competitor instead of you.

7. Business Intelligence solutions: The market is not responsive enough

This problem is virtually as irritating, as losing clients — you produce something, but the market reacts too slowly, or even doesn’t react at all. And if you don’t understand what’s going on, you won’t be able to solve the problem and lead your company to success. Using business intelligence solutions, you will be able to define what the market is purchasing at the moment. You can analyze the reports on a daily basis, so your decisions will be even more efficient and relevant. For instance, if you identify where and how many items of a certain product were sold, you will be able to improve your sales strategy.

8. Actionable insights are almost impossible to find

Business intelligence can solve numerous problems, but the most obvious of them is getting actionable insights. BI services allow turning loads of information into a report, which is easy to understand. And, logically, getting actionable insights from such a report is much more possible than from multiple sources of data.

For example, if you are trying to choose a manufacturer for your product, you can analyze sales of different manufacturers and understand if any of them had a large sales increase or decline. Considering these trends, you may want to ask your potential manufacturer some extra questions regarding the reasons for these changes.

Read more about BI for Data Analysis.

Now you know a lot about business intelligence solutions, so you can start implementing the BI services and making your business more efficient. But if you still have any extra questions, you know how to get in touch with us. We are always here to help, so don’t hesitate to send us a message.



Category:


Business Intelligence