Business Intelligence - 10 popular advantages

Remove guesswork

Looking at the ways in which companies are managed, it's hard not to get the impression that they sometimes resemble gambling. Should this be the case? Company managers are often forced to make decisions based solely on their gut feeling. If it were your company, would you take any of these methods as a serious way to achieve strategy? Running a business based on guesswork means that you lack comprehensive business data, creating a reliable, stable structure that allows you to make informed decisions.

With business intelligence analytics, you get accurate data, tailored to your needs, real-time updates and predictive capabilities. More advanced systems even allow you to predict conditional "what if" scenarios, eliminating the need to guess or estimate.

Get quick responses.

Some users of BI systems cite the ability to answer business questions quickly as a key advantage. As a result, decision-making is less time-consuming and does not require endless pages of written or mismatched reports.

Use data 24/7, from any location

With modern mobile business intelligence systems, any team member can access key company data after basic training. This can include business metrics (KPIs), dashboards and other critical reports. For many solutions, access via mobile devices is also possible. Thus, business analysis can be accessed from anywhere at the time you need it.

Profile customer behavior.

More and more companies are emphasizing getting to know their customer as thoroughly as possible in building competitiveness. Buyer profiling helps answer questions about who the customer is and how their value changes over time. This approach results in better matching of product and marketing content to the real needs of the audience, as well as on optimizing customer acquisition channels. In other words, it provides an opportunity to invest money in acquiring those customers on whom there is an opportunity to generate the highest margin.

Real-time upselling.

The ability to identify past customer behavior is an unprecedented opportunity for real-time up-selling. This is especially true in desktop sales and face-to-face customer service. A salesperson with access to a customer's profile and offers of goods and services for up-selling tailored to a specific person is able to achieve much higher effectiveness than without it. A precisely tailored offer can also increase the satisfaction of the customer himself and help build loyalty.

Explore new areas for optimization.

It is often the case that the proper arrangement of data on visualizations allows you to find previously unknown relationships between indicators. You may discover that the margin significantly depends on the sales channel or location. In more advanced systems, appropriate algorithms themselves "catch" anomalies and present them to users of analysis.

Automatically integrate data.

Many companies waste valuable time on manual operations of merging, comparing and cleaning data. Often, it is not entirely clear what operations were performed manually on the data file, which in effect destroys the credibility of the final report. By implementing a BI system, all analysis is built on a stable data model. This gives no room for human error and saves time and energy.

Discover the true costs.

A properly structured BI system enables a better understanding of production costs. It allows you to assign human and material costs to the appropriate services or products. As a result, it allows you to discover the true profitability of the components of your business.

Increase marketing and warehouse efficiency.

Business intelligence software helps improve inventory management (the right quantity at the right time) and reduce backlogs. Advanced analytics are even able to estimate future product demand using historical trends and a changing customer base. Integrating data from marketing channels like Google AdWords and Facebook into BI analytics allows you to determine the effective margin on sales in these channels. This way you know how much you are actually earning from paid traffic.

Analyze and forecast

One of the biggest advantages of a BI system is that it reports company statistics in specific time frames, such as how many parts of a particular product were sold, in which location and by which sales representative. Graphical visualization of these results allows users to process the information contained more quickly. Creating run-rate analysis allows users to estimate the degree of execution of the monthly sales plan. This gives important feedback to the marketing and sales departments, allowing them to react in near real time. Automatic trend detection, on the other hand, allows you to create relatively reliable forecasts of sales in the future period. Good estimation of future revenues allows better planning of resources, and increases credibility and valuation in the eyes of investors.