5 Ways to Use Business Intelligence in Your Company

Larger corporations benefit from the luxury of having dedicated departments with significant budgets for gathering, organizing, analyzing, and deriving insights from data. Conversely, smaller businesses often depend on self-service business intelligence tools and in-house data repositories, which are typically unstructured and challenging to mine for valuable insights.

Recognizing and appreciating the value of a company's data as a crucial asset marks the initial phase of integrating business intelligence into an organization, regardless of its size. Here are ways to use business intelligence in your company.

Monitor Key Performance Metrics

Organizations frequently monitor many key performance indicators, with some departments managing as many KPIs individually. Navigating and making sense of such a large number of business metrics is unmanageable without technological assistance.

This is the domain where BI excels: Specialists point out its effectiveness in revealing insights by selecting which KPIs to monitor and integrating supplementary data points to provide additional context to those KPIs.

BI and data analysts leverage BI tools to prioritize certain data points over others due to their greater impact. This technique assists organizations in comprehending the influence of these factors on their KPIs.

Optimize Business Operations

In a standard organization, the sheer amount of operational data can be overwhelming, making it difficult for both employees engaged in specific business activities and their managers to spot trends. However, BI technologies such as embedded analytics can aggregate extensive data from ERP systems and various business applications, revealing operational patterns that require attention.

For instance, BI solutions can pinpoint inefficiencies in manufacturing workflows, supply chain congestions, and imbalanced IT networks, where certain systems are overburdened while others are barely used. A DBA business intelligence degree can help you learn to identify and optimize these processes.

Consolidating and Collecting Data

Automating this process is crucial depending on the platforms your business utilizes for data collection. Your KPIs must be seamlessly integrated into your data storage solution, irrespective of the different locations where information might currently reside based on your organizational structure.

The following step involves the challenging task of data consolidation before any significant insights can be derived. If your internal resources are limited, self-service business intelligence tools are available that simplify the process of amalgamating data from various platforms.

This step is pivotal, second only to identifying the specific data you wish to gather. Organizing your data in an accessible, visualizable, and analyzable manner is essential for generating consistent BI insights.

Prioritize Digitization

Business intelligence originates from data gathered, preserved, and analyzed via technological devices. This implies that a business's functions, including contracts, sales, payroll, and outreach activities, should be managed through digital channels instead of traditional physical processes. 

When implemented effectively, digitization not only contributes to the generation of actionable BI but also significantly boosts operational efficiency and improves the overall customer experience. The full transition to digital platforms provides access to various affordable online analytics tools, enabling companies of any scale to gain insights from analytics.

These tools can further convert non-digital operational segments into digital formats. The primary objective behind digitizing business operations is to capture and then examine the produced data, thus uncovering inefficiency hotspots within the business that would likely remain undetected in the absence of digitization.

Recognize Qualitative vs Quantitative Data Differences

There's a widespread misunderstanding among businesses that numbers are the only data that matter. This belief often causes emerging organizations to overlook a crucial element on their data exploration path. While it's true that quantitative data is vital, qualitative data holds equal importance. 

Customer feedback, outreach interactions, reviews, and testimonials all play a significant role in understanding and enhancing a business's performance. Quantitative data often complements insights gained from qualitative analysis and can even uncover patterns not visible in the qualitative information.

Endnote

Harnessing and utilizing the data your business generates is key to establishing a competitive edge and optimizing operations. Many cost-effective and simple-to-use tools and solutions are available to support any small business in addressing their business intelligence (BI) needs.