Why Business Intelligence (BI) Can be Your Business’s Secret Weapon?

Have you ever asked the question why business intelligence (BI) is important for your business? Read this article to find out why and how to get started with Business Intelligence.

Let’s get started.

What is a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?

Let’s put it in a nutshell. The process of uncovering and evaluating data in an organization to make informed business decisions is BI. BI encompasses various techniques and applications, from how data is structured and processed to how results are delivered. For example, BI determines how a company fared in the previous years and why those results were.

1. Marketing Department

BI technologies enable marketers to monitor campaign analytics from a single digital location. BI systems can help with marketing management, assess the effectiveness of each marketing attempt, and prepare for potential activities. This data offers marketing departments more insights into the overall performance and relevant graphics to share with the firm.

Example: Let’s see how Starbucks brewed up the perfect blend using data. It collects customized purchasing data from millions of consumers. The colossal coffee firm then estimates what purchase or services a person may be interested in using the data and business intelligence tools. Then, through mobile devices, the corporation tells clients about deals that it feels they will wish to take benefit of. This technique allows Starbucks to bring in more consumers and enhance its sales volume. In this regard, BI is reminiscent of old CRM solutions. Employing BI dashboards in the marketing department helps them form their marketing strategy and attain desired goals.

2. Operations Department

Managers may access and evaluate data such as supply chain analytics to discover methods to optimize procedures and save time and costs. Business intelligence solutions may also assist in guaranteeing that performance level commitments are maintained and distribution channels are improved.

Example: Chipotle Mexican Grill is a restaurant franchise in the United States with over 2,400 branches globally. Chipotle ditched its legacy BI system to favor a new, self-service BI platform. The adoption enabled them to develop a consolidated perspective of operations, allowing them to monitor café operational performance nationwide. In addition, with the increased data availability, report generation for important initiatives has changed from quarterly to monthly, saving a lot of time.

4. Sales Department

For rapid access to detailed information such as discount assessment, profitability, and retention of customers, sales data analysts and operations managers frequently employ Business Intelligence software and key performance indicators (KPIs). Sales representatives use monitors with statistics and data visualizations to track revenue objectives, sales representatives’ effectiveness, and the state of the sales funnel.

Example: Amazon, the most prominent e-commerce player on the planet, shows us the value of business intelligence. It employs business intelligence software to customize product suggestions and promote items and leverages it for logistical marketing decisions. In addition, actual detailed data research keeps Amazon’s colossal supply chain running smoothly. Data and business intelligence technologies affect nearly every stage of Amazon’s supply chain, from optimizing delivery routes to distributing inventories among warehouses.

5. Human Resource Department

Using a Business intelligence solution allows HR departments to streamline staffing without losing quality. Using BI, an HR department may construct a blended description of the best applicant for a position given the current payroll system. They may also monitor the employment process and use the information to enhance it.

Example: Google has already been able to entirely revamp its HR department by putting Business intelligence/HR analytics to use. They believe that workforce planning enables more effective managerial choices. These choices are critical because they have the most significant influence on its bottom line. Organizations cannot achieve better business outcomes unless their managers make the most informed and correct judgments about their personnel.

6. Customer Service Department

Business intelligence benefits the customer service department by delivering real-time statistics. It lets you make evidence-based decisions and respond rapidly to consumer behavior by updating information from different devices and touchpoints right onto a dashboard.

Example: Expedia uses BI for customer satisfaction. The organization was manually gathering mounds of data with insufficient evaluation time. They saw the potential in using BI and were quick to strike while the iron was hot. Their customer satisfaction team examined consumer data across the organization and correlated the outcomes to 10 objectives that were directly tied to corporate efforts using business intelligence.

1. Improvement in Customer Satisfaction: Business intelligence software may assist businesses in understanding consumer trends and actions. Most firms will collect consumer feedback, and this data may help organizations maintain existing customers and attract new ones. BI technologies may also assist businesses in identifying purchasing trends, allowing customer care representatives to anticipate demands and provide better assistance.

2. Make Right Decisions: The competition in the business universe is utterly fierce. Companies must make judgments as rapidly as possible. Failure to handle concerns appropriately and promptly may result in lost clients and money. You can reduce decision-making time by sending data to the relevant stakeholders at the right time.

3. Enhance Efficiency: Business executives may use BI to access data, acquire a comprehensive perspective of their divisions, and measure outcomes. Leaders can quickly identify strong-points and potential for growth when they have a comprehensive view of the organization.

4. Dominate the Market: You can adapt, change, and maintain a competitive advantage once you have the appropriate knowledge. BI reporting accelerates procedures and reveals insights that can fuel operations. Stand out from the competition by seizing chances and embracing new technology before competitors do. Furthermore, the efficient procedures and valuable information provided by BI will save valuable time and resources that can expand your organization’s horizons.

5. Enhance Growth Patterns: Firms may discover market trends and enhance profitability by utilizing all available data. Recognize different purchasing patterns by using and analyzing data from internal and external marketplaces. Market circumstances might assist in identifying any company concerns that could otherwise go unreported.

6. Achieve Growth in Revenue: The most crucial aim for any organization is to increase income. Through evaluations across several dimensions and spotting sales gaps, data from Business Intelligence tools may help firms ask insightful questions to understand why things are happening in a specific way. Revenue is significantly more likely to arise when organizations respond to their consumers, monitor their competition, and improve processes.

7. Increase Margins: Most sales but low profits is any business’s nightmare. One may use BI technologies to analyze bottlenecks and assist increase margins. Accumulated sales data help businesses better understand their clients and enable sales teams to establish better plans for where funds should be.

1. Set up one-on-one Meetings

There is nothing better if you have strong listening and synthesizing abilities. You have to send across your interview questions much before time so individuals may ponder their responses before you arrive, resulting in better, more considered reactions. Make sure that you ask the appropriate queries. A few questions not to ask may include: “What data do you require?” and “How do you want the report to appear?” A few questions that deem to produce the intended results include, “What are you attempting to achieve?” “What will you do if you have this data?” “What are your objectives?” and “What are your inducements?”

2. Distribute Surveys

Surveys are an excellent method to get valuable feedback. Most customers are put under pressure during a session (if they have not dutifully prepared themselves). A survey allows people to review the questions and consider their responses before submitting them.

3. Use process Mapping to Visualize Workflows

A BI solution is a tool for illuminating one or more business operations. To learn about those procedures, discover how data flows through each process and how data availability might help to simplify them.

4. Don’t Reinvent

In reverse engineering, most metrics, characteristics, and measurements for a report released or displayed may be found in current reports or information systems. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or broaden the notion.

Business intelligence (BI) case studies

Banking Case study

AMEX (American Express): To start with, American Express (Amex) differs from Visa and Mastercard in that it operates on a confined basis. This implies that you have access to information regarding purchases made by the company and the cardholder. The information provides them with a thorough insight into how firms promote and consumers purchase. Using Business Intelligence, they could monitor this behavior and avoided almost $2 million in fraudulent behavior even before the money disappeared.

Amex deals are among numerous applications available from American Express. For example, Amex can provide personalized offers and promotions to cardholders by researching their purchasing habits. Furthermore, using the same information, one may identify restaurants and services that the user might love.

Amex is in the vanguard of the use of Business Intelligence in digitalization. It’s the only credit card company that has significantly boosted client acquisition using internet marketing while lowering expenses by not depending primarily on direct mailing. It has raised earnings and paved the way for additional focused perks, such as Amex Express Checkout, making online purchasing exceedingly simple.

Healthcare Case study:

Poudre Valley Health System (PVHS) is a 50,000-square-mile statewide system that delivers extensive, scientifically-prooven treatment and health services to northern Colorado, western Nebraska, and southern Wyoming residents. The privately managed non-profit organization, which engages over 5,000 people and has around 500 doctors in over 40 specialties and disciplines on board, has a specific objective: To provide world-class treatment to the patients.

By promoting awareness of advances in clinical care and customer safety, PVHS adopts an assertive and constructive stance toward Medicare’s compensation program. The business’s clinical quality activities focus on health chart inspections, patient safety forecasts, statistical analytic projects, and medical record conformity assessments.

PVHS needed to find innovations to continue improving productivity and enhance best practices across the organization. They even wanted to maximize remuneration from payers to compensate for the effects of increasing medical costs as the National health system shifts toward refunding hospitals regarding the quality of healthcare provided instead of the number of surgeries done.

PVHS used the WebFOCUS Business Intelligence (BI) system from Information Builders to assist it in sounding right of the massive volumes of data on consumer health and quality of service stored in the numerous clinical, economic, and human capital systems managed. As a result, majority of workers from the organization now have rapid access to critical information to follow trends and assess at the site, department, or personnel level.

PVHS has easily accomplished its objectives of better care quality, higher operational performance, and cost-effectiveness with WebFOCUS. Indeed, the company is currently in the top 10% for heart condition care, patient and provider happiness, and doctor commitment. In addition, its charges are always lesser than their local competitors.

Retail Case Study:                                           

Walmart: Walmart is one of the giant American retail corporations. Walmart had drowned in data, with around 245 million consumers accessing nearly 10,000 shops and ten sites. The statistics were instrumental in comprehending each consumer and categorizing transactions by product kind, region, and time to determine the number of goods required at any particular moment.

Walmart’s sites were the first set of data to be cleaned up. They had ten sites, each using a Hadoop cluster of ten nodes to keep records. Walmart planned to finally have a particular site and a 250 node Hadoop cluster as the foundation for all of its online consumer data to streamline its internet presence. Because Hadoop is an unorganized system, the most difficult challenge was processing the information and extracting usable understandings from it. That’s where BI comes in.

BI assisted in streamlining and analyzing information so that the managers and the executives could grasp the figures in these enormous Hadoopgroups and make better sales choices. In addition to utilizing BI to position things in front of the consumers when needed, Walmart employed BI to monitor the pricing of different goods in the industry. As a result, they seemed to have the edge over their competitors regarding the price of products and were beyond their rivals.

Takeaway

Most organizations now utilize BI to analyze consumer behavior better and boost their bottom line. A few examples are Netflix, Twitter, Uber, Lowe’s, Tesla, Coca-Cola, and Chipotle. Business intelligence isn’t a one-hoax pony. As demonstrated by the preceding cases, BI has many applications. Businesses that ask appropriate queries and visualize information more effectively than their competitors will eventually distinguish themselves from the industry. So don’t squander your time. Look into what makes a solid BI solution and how it can help you be distinctive.

Lastly, ask yourself whether you are looking for a simple way to view your data in an easy-to-digest format. A reporting tool might be all you need. However, if your company needs to analyze its data in more detail, you might also want to consider a data mining tool. Whatever your needs are, we can help you with our data visualization services and become your reliable partner. Want to learn more? Talk to one of our experts. 

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