Business intelligence, or BI for short, offers leaders the ability to understand what’s happening in their organizations at a micro level. It provides real-time, actionable data that fuels intelligent decision-making. In the end, a successful use of BI will lead to a reduction of risk, flexibility to keep up with changing customer expectations, and the ability to quickly pivot when adjustments need to be made to meet market or business needs. This explains why they BI industry is expected to grow to a $33.3 billion industry by 2025.
In today’s world, the majority of companies leverage some type of BI in their processes, but often, they still lack the clarity that can help them leverage these tools in different kinds of use cases. With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of use cases you should consider as you delve into your own organization’s BI capabilities.
1. Tracking Your KPIs
One of the best use cases for BI is the ability to track your key performance indicators (KPIs) and critical success factors (CSFs) across multiple business departments, including the following:
- Sales and marketing
- Finance
- Project management
- Human resources
- IT
- Operations
- Management
Today’s BI solutions give you unprecedented insights into the operations and performance of your organization. With these tools, you can do everything from gauge customer sentiment to estimate average order values. You have the ability to measure a seemingly endless array of metrics, including average response times, employee turnover rates, upsell rates, and profit margins, just to name a few.
When you know what KPIs are most important to your business, BI can help you measure and analyze them with ease.
2. Improving Operations
Companies can deploy BI solutions to automate manual reporting processes. In doing so, vital organizational data is put directly into the hands stakeholders and employees through enterprise system integrations that translate into interactive dashboards, which provide timely, actionable information.
BI tools aid in the enhancement of operational efficiency and support corporate strategies. By giving companies the ability to measure their performance and seek out competitive advantages, BI helps crate strategic roadmaps that align with organizational goals and customer needs. By employing powerful data mining and statistics, BI solutions can help leaders gain new perspectives and alter their strategic visions while keeping pace with ever-evolving market conditions. This, in turn, drives business growth and helps to maintain market position.
3. Accelerating and Improving Business Decision-Making
BI marries data mining, analysis, and visualization, giving leaders an inclusive view of the organization’s data. This information can then be used to make company decisions in a more informed manner.
Using business intelligence tools to support decision-making processes is a key use case for these solutions. It’s becoming increasingly more critical for companies to be able to use data to make informed decisions. If you find yourself making decisions that aren’t founded in data, or if your data lacks the quality you need to support solid decision-making strategies, it’s probably time to look into a better BI solution.
4. Boosting Productivity and Efficiency
A robust BI tool can significantly improve employee productivity and efficiency. By identifying issues and bottlenecks facing employees, BI can enable you to rectify those problems in a timely manner, thereby streamlining the experiences employees have with business tools and systems.
At the same time, BI can help eliminate manual data entry tasks, which ultimately should boost employee engagement while simultaneously minimizing dependency on the IT team to run complex reports or identify critical insights.
5. Enhancing Research and Reporting
BI solutions enable leaders to access vital information in real-time, providing them with the ability to delve into research, data estimates, and meeting analytics on a whim. This allows organizations to leverage BI solutions in ways that let them dissect and manipulate data for research and reporting needs.
6. Continuously Analyzing Data
BI tools are great for continuously analyzing data and transforming it into actionable insights so you can make more informed business decisions on an ongoing basis. With this information, you’ll be better able to identify trends, bottlenecks, and opportunities so you can create strategies that optimize business outcomes.
BI also helps leaders better manage supply chain issues, giving them the ability to determine the root causes of underlying issues as quickly as possible so solutions can be put in place to mitigate problems before they snowball.
Business Intelligence from MIBAR
If you’re finding that your BI solution is lackluster (or maybe non-existent), it’s time to make a leap to the next generation of business intelligence. At MIBAR, we understand the value of powerful BI software, and know the role it provides in improving your decision making while growing your business. Implementation, integration, training, and more, we provide you with the tools, technology, and know-how to leverage business intelligence software now and in the future.
Whether you need BI functionality embedded into your ERP software or are looking for a standalone product that integrates to show you the whole picture—we have helped companies just like yours to discover, implement, and operate essential business software for nearly three decades. Get to know more about our work, read customer testimonials, and contact us for a free consultation.
Additional Business Intelligence Resources
How Not Using BI May Be Costing Your Business
