The business push to adopt new age enterprise technologies is increasingly on the rise. There is greater demand for accountability, accessible technologies including the urge to do a lot more for very less. Business intelligence is one technology that has over the years developed to form a perfect solution to entities around the globe.

What is Business Intelligence?<

Business intelligence (BI) is the skills, technologies, applications, practices and processes used to leverage an enterprise or an institution’s internal as well as external information assets that support and improve decision-making.

Business Intelligence Components

There are a number of components integrated to form a business intelligence system, these include:

• Multidimensional aggregation as well as allocation
• Realtime reporting system
• Specific method of interface together with unstructured data
• Control and process management
• Renormalization and standardization
• Group consolidation, rolling forecast and budgeting
• Open time management
• Statistical inference and simulation
• Key performance optimization

The intelligence process entails three distinct tasks:

Gathering necessary data about your business is done to automate the whole process. In the past, this would have been a tricky task to handle but all credit going to digital technology, modern computer systems are currently available make your work easy and more time efficient.

The next task is to analyze the gathered data and extract necessary information to be converted later to business knowledge.

The final BI task is using the collected business knowledge to improve different departments in your business. There are a number of BI tools developed with the intention of facilitating the process of collecting business knowledge. Depending with what you will be working with, you can utilize BI categories such as OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), Text Mining, Data Mining, Decision Support and many more.

What is the purpose of Business Intelligence?<

The ultimate purpose of Business Intelligence is improving time and quality of information. This is made possible through the information that you generate from external indicators, and then later make accurate forecast of future economic and social trends. Once the process is completed carefully and effectively, you will have the chance to make conclusions that could benefit the organization.

In this fast-paced competitive business environment, the most significant reaction for any business should be adapting to change such as implementing Business Intelligence system. This intelligence system will enable you to know:

• The actual position of your business entity compared to your competitors
• The spending patterns of your customers
• Capacity of your firm
• Market conditions
• Social, regulatory, including the political atmosphere
• Your competitors’ next step

Benefits of Implementing Business Intelligence

BI offers enterprise owners great number of benefits that any company whether big or small would be happy to experience. 

1. Fact-based decisions

Once the intelligence system is in place, you, including the rest of the management team will see detailed data, which comprises financial, production, and consumer data. Make sure you read the information in a predetermined fashion. This information will then help management result to fact-based analysis and decision-making.

2. Improves Sales

A Business Intelligence system can act as a valuable mechanism to sales in a company since it provides access to current reports identifying how sales is trending, business improvements, consumer preference as well as unexplored markets.

3. Eliminate waste

BI has the power to point out waste lying in different sectors in a business that would go unnoticed in normal system. The program will analyze transactions between different departments to identify any areas of inefficiency.

4. Identify opportunities.

The intelligence system can help your enterprise assess its capabilities to identify different conditions and then compare the business performance with the rest in the market. This will definitely assist decision-makers to act swiftly and appropriately responding to each opportunity. You will be able to identify your customers according the amount of profit generated by each.

BI is an imperative concept because it provides assistance in developing significant long lasting relationships between employers, employees, products including customers. Apart from playing several roles, business intelligence is a possession that business owners and proprietors use to understand their clients better by noting their considerations, which definitely affects business operations.

Business Intelligence versus Competitive Intelligence

Since the two support decision-making, BI sometimes is used as a synonym to refer to Competitive Intelligence. Business intelligence explores technology, applications and processes to scrutinize mostly the internal structured data including other business processes, whereas Competitive Intelligence gathers, examines and then disseminates information focusing on the competitors. It is included as a subset to BI.

Comparing Business intelligence with Business Analytic

These are terms sometimes used interchangeably, but each has its own unique meaning. BI is generally gathering business data mainly through asking queries, reporting and online analytical procedures. On the other hand, Business Analytics uses statistical and quantitative measures for descriptive and predictive modeling

Applications of BI

The implementation of BI practices and tools is gradually moving to the enterprise level. More and more entities are becoming involved with the initiative and management of business intelligence budget, which is different from the past when the process was considered an IT initiative. The intelligence is today institutionalized thus enabling the use of advanced analytics and complex event processing to enable the businesses address more issues that are complex and at the same time ensure that maximum returns is realized.

There will be need to add new product categories including other options as BI continues to be adopted by more firms. This is to ensure that the system is implemented according to business type. Some analytic intelligence applications are delivered through software services as standard BI components while others are dealing with collaborative decision-making, which will then be combined with business intelligence to manage the business.

Business Intelligence is a process that helps companies to collect important details, analyze them, and then utilize this information to improve operations. With the process at hand, businesses now have access to the best approach including selections as to what is needed, going to be retained, modified, renewed or trashed. The intelligence system is a process and a form of business knowledge that is highly rooted to the basics of trade and commerce. Implementing the system will play a significant role in business consulting, strategy and planning so always consult with a consulting company like Simulthink< that cares about your success and wish to help.