As a business, one of your most important assets is your data. and the amount of data a business produces is growing significantly year on year. To get more out of the data, many businesses are turning to business intelligence (BI). BI lets businesses analyse, manage and visualise their data.
Check out our 8 benefits of business intelligence.
Advantages of Business Intelligence
Here are 8 benefits of business intelligence. We’ve written previously about what is business intelligence, so be sure to read that article for more information.
1. Increased Efficiency
BI lets business leaders see data and gain a holistic view of their departments, and benchmark results against the entire organisation. With a holistic view of the organisation, leaders can easily see areas of strength, and opportunities for improvement.
2. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Business Inelligence software can help companies understand customer behaviours and patterns. The majority of companies will take customer feedback in real time and this information can help businesses retain customers and reach new ones. BI tools can also help companies identify buying patterns, which help customer experience employees anticipate needs and deliver better service.
3. Improve Growth Patterns
Similarly, with the help of all the data, businesses can identify market trends and help improve profit margins for the company. Identify new sales trends by leveraging data from the internal and external markets and analysing the data. The market conditions can help spot any business issues that can otherwise go unnoticed.
4. Market leadership
When you have the right information to hand, you can respond, transform, and stay ahead of the game. BI reporting streamlines processes and unlocks insights you can transform into actions. Stay ahead of the game by taking opportunities and adopting new technologies before others know about them. Plus, the efficient processes and meaningful information afforded by BI will save precious time and resources which can be spent on growing your business instead.
5. Accurate Decision Making
Competition moves quickly. It’s vital for companies to make decisions as quickly as possible. Not addressing issues accurately and quickly could lead to lost customers and revenue. If you can leverage existing data to deliver information to the right stakeholders at the right time, this will optimise the time-to-decision.
6. Boost Productivity
More and more businesses are finding business intelligence to be a critical tool to ensure competitiveness and productivity. Management teams are aware of the daily challenges trying to assess raw data manually. With BI solutions, managers can access, analyse and share information across the business. This allows for more intelligent responses to trends in production, material usage, labour, supplier information and more.
7. Improved Margins
Profit margins are, naturally, a concern for most businesses. With BI tools, you can analyse inefficiencies and help expand margins. Aggregated sales data helps companies to understand their customers and empowers sales teams to develop better strategies about where budgets should be spent.
8. Increased Revenue
Increasing revenue is perhaps the most important goal for any business. Data from BI tools can help businesses ask better questions about why things happened through making comparisons across different dimensions and identifying sales weaknesses. When organisations are listening to their customers, watching their competitors, and improving their operations, revenue is much more likely to increase.
Benefits of Business Intelligence to Your Organisation
Your business needs to make informed decisions to improve performance and grow. BI tools can make this happen. See how Microsoft’s business intelligence tools can benefit your business.
