Definition
Business Intelligence is a process of using technologies and strategies to analyze the enterprise's data. The main objective of BI is to improve strategic decision-making. There are many tools used in BI to collect and integrate data from multiple data sources and to visualize data to make reports and dashboards.
Now we look at the use of BI in specific departments:
Human Resources:
BI can be useful for the HR department by giving benefits of tracking payroll, annual appraisal, employee turnover, gender ratio, and many other reports.
Finance:
The finance department is a key department of an enterprise where BI can provide insights into their financial data and help track budgets, customer and vendor aging, stock movement and fixed assets, etc. It also helps to improve the financial stability of an organization.
Sales:
We get income from sales and to increase sales we use BI techniques to help us earn more with our strategic decisions. BI can forecast sales by using “what if” analysis, linear regression, and other techniques to help the organization to increase sales.
BI Tools:
The most common tools which are used in Business Intelligence are:
- For Spreadsheets: Google Docs and MS Excel
- For reporting and visualization: MS Power BI, Tableau, Sisense, Qlik, Looker, Domo and Business Objects etc.
- For Data Mining: Alteryx Designer, SAS, and SSDT etc.
Benefits:
- BI enhances the decision-making capability of a company by analyzing its key performance indicators from multiple data sources. With the help of better visualization, the management can take strategic decisions to grow their company.
- When the data is analyzed manually, we cannot get better efficiency. By using BI, we can sort data and generate reports faster, giving us better insights and generally increasing efficiency.
- With the use of BI, enterprises can reduce blockage, the tasks can be automated, refinement of processes, and generally have a better organization.
- The real-time data-driven reports help the companies make better decisions and direct the teams to take necessary actions.
- Companies using data analysis techniques can get the trends and patterns which help them enhance their processes and resources.
- BI can be helpful to a company in evaluating the employee’s performance, increasing salary, and promoting them according to their work performance.
- The Industrial Engineering department can use BI to help them quickly calculate a company's current and required strength.
- BI increases productivity which results in to increase in the company’s profit.
- A few times ago, most companies didn’t have the access to complete and arrange or assemble the data which leads to human error.
- BI can be helpful to an organization by providing better services to customers, their chat history, and purchase history and upgrading the customer experience.
Conclusion:
The use of business intelligence is a productive business strategy. It helps in generating higher revenue, removing, or reducing blockages in processes, and upgrading the customer experience.
