How BI will Transform Your Business

What is BI ?
Business Intelligence(BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, Business Managers, and other end users to make more informed business decisions. BI helps businesses to gather a vast amount of data and make it available in a single convenient location.
Why Everyone is Talking About it?
Today, Large Medium and small businesses invest in BI understanding the value of data. BI can help across your business to reach success. Data will help you to understand your customers and their preferences to take more informed business decisions.
BI can transform your business bringing all the data sources together processing them and generating reports to make more informed and accurate decisions by accessing your data from anywhere on any device.The most important decisions in a business organization are, taken considering the historical data, forecasts, and market researches. We can use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to get the correct data more efficiently.
KPI
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are matrices used to track the performance of a business, department or individuals against goals.
The key is for more informed decision making is to identify the KPIs that are more relevant to your industry and business goals. (Few important KPIs in Sales Department: Sales growth, Average profit margin, Sales Target, Sales performance by product, Budgeted Revenue Vs Actual Revenue, etc.)
How BI is Going to Transform Your Business,
There are many ways that you can get the help of BI to improve your business.
Here are few points from the list.
1. You’ll be Able to Serve Your Customers Better
Studies have found that the probability of selling to an existing customer is higher than selling to a new customer.
Therefore, the customer Experience is important as much as the sales to an organization. Identifying top customers will help your sales team to maintain a good customer-relationship when rewarding and offering services and discounts. Having a good understanding of your customers' buying habits, what they purchase and when they do can get you new perspectives to help in decision making and forecasting. With the help of BI, your Sales team can track and analyze customers’ buying habits and their feedback. Connecting Business Intelligence with other processes such as real-time data of your stock balance will make your sales person’s life easier as well as helps to take immediate decisions and a better service.
2. Identify Market Segments
The importance of identifying market segments which are related to your product/ service will help you to focus on the right audience in order to gain the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Ex: geographical representations of the consumers of your product, a bar chart of Age limits of the people who are looking for a similar product.
3. Visualize and Analyze
BI will help you to identify patterns and variations, visualizing your data with the most convenient graphical representations. Here is a Sales Pipeline Sample Report on Microsoft Power BI online, providing more perspectives to understand the data.
4. Increase Performance of Your Employees
The Success of your company depends on how your employees perform. BI can give your employees insights by visualizing their performances. (Ex: the sales targets vs the achievement). It will help to stick with the goal and contribute as a team as well. It’s important to see the team’s performance for managers. There you can identify under-performers and motivate them and give a recognition to the high-performers.
5. Consider All Possibilities
Use your data wisely and selectively, with a broader view which allows you to consider different data sources, reports to look in different perspectives and solve a problem rather than taking a decision by going through a single report.
What’s Next?
There are several Business Intelligence tools are out there, which can make wonders for your business with your data. It’s all about how you are going to get the benefit from the tools. Business Intelligence is vastly emerging in every industry and the data will become the new currency soon. If you acquire BI today, your business will be ready for the next revolution, above the competition.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on August 28, 2017.
