Harnessing Business Intelligence: a path to organisational success

As an example, for those in the warehousing industries, revenue losses may happen when you under or overstock. Relying on instincts for market trends and seasonal fluctuations is just not sufficiently accurate in modern business. Where businesses once relied on monthly or quarterly reports to determine the amount of stock required, market changes are making this a completely unreliable and outdated technique. This ultimately results in over- or understocking, which means losses to the company somewhere along the line. With a BI solution, your business is able to quickly respond to changes in stock, allowing you to meet the existing customer demand, rather than an anticipated one.

Employees can often be one of the biggest potential disadvantages of implementing BI. Employees or various departments might be against implementation of BI software and disinterested in learning how to use it effectively. This will result in the BI software being a wasted investment. However, not investing in BI and reporting may result in some serious longer term profit losses.

Another concern is in relation to employee performance. In the past, it was very difficult to accurately assess an employee’s performance. Employers would rely on HOD reports, customer feedback and annual appraisals which don’t always pinpoint areas of underperformance or even areas of exceptional work ethic. BI uses visual representation of data in the form of dashboards allowing a quick overview showing employee performance.

Your IT department is undoubtedly spending a large portion of time dealing with requests for reports across the entire company. This is an ineffective use of  IT time and can be saved through BI. End users are able to access reports relevant to them. This ensures your IT department is focused on more pressing issues.

Too often, there’s miscommunication and even animosity within a company because of inter-departmental friction. This effectively wastes time and resources as teams are insular and siloed. With BI, your departments are able to work more seamlessly with access to data. The quick overview provided by a dashboard and unique business insights will break down barriers and encourage cohesive daily operations.

This compartmentalisation isn’t beneficial for employees, and it certainly isn’t beneficial for employers, as valuable connections are often overlooked. With BI tools, the data across the entire business is collated, cleaned and displayed as dashboards, giving you insights into business operations that would previously have been missed. You have access to customer satisfaction ratings, surveys, social media listening and other data-critical tools that help drive your business further.

By not investing in BI it’s almost impossible to know why your customers have gone elsewhere. However, with a BI system you’ve got access to real-time data and therefore able to see any customer loss almost immediately. This allows you to act quickly in rectifying the cause for the loss – whether it’s better competitor pricing, customer experience or even missed trends. By understanding your customers at an even deeper level, you’re able to customise your approach and improve the experience.

A question we get asked often is whether measuring the success of a BI implementation is possible? Our answer is, yes, you can measure the success of a BI implementation by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved decision-making, and by conducting user satisfaction surveys.

For this and many other reasons, PowerBI is our chosen BI tool. It is the market leader with a 36% market share in BI as well as having full integration with Microsoft Office tools, including Excel, SharePoint, and Microsoft Flow. However, the best BI tool for your organisation will depend on your specific needs, budget, and technical requirements. Popular alternatives include Tableau and QlikView. Data that is fed into a BI solution needs to be useful. We’ve all heard about the term “Garbage in, Garbage out”. With an over 20 year track record in the data space, Digiata will seamlessly extract, transform, and feed the correct data into your BI solution.

If you want a quick overview of business Intelligence and Reporting you can watch a brief explainer video HERE.