In today’s world, competition requires businesses to make prompt decisions based on accurate data. Traditional data processing methods can no longer cope with the volume of data generated by companies. Thus, BI systems are the main tool for data analysis, visualization of indicators, and improving management efficiency. Thanks to the integration of BI systems, enterprises can quickly get answers to important questions: from assessing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to forecasting sales. Today, when there is a data analytics consulting company on the market, BI implementation becomes accessible even to small and medium-sized businesses, making analytics a powerful strategic advantage.
What Is Business Intelligence?
You can’t do without business analytics when working with large volumes of data, studying company indicators, and making decisions about when to introduce improvements and how to do it.
Business analytics opens up new opportunities. It helps managers make meaningful decisions based on clear and understandable data provided by programs.
There are three tasks of business intelligence:
- Collect important data on the company’s operations in the form of numbers.
- Structure and process data for further analysis.
- Analyze the received data, and detect patterns, anomalies, and trends. Predict the company’s development paths in the current conditions, and offer solutions to identified problems.
BI systems are developed based on the basic principles of BI analytics. These BI systems help businesses when there are too many reports, and it becomes difficult to structure and analyze information.
What Are BI Systems And Who Benefits From Them?
The term BI system refers to the technology of converting data from various sources into dashboards and sets of reports that are visual and understandable to end users. The main consumers of BI systems are large and medium-sized organizations in all areas of activity, including government agencies. BI systems can simplify and speed up data analytics processes, they help users make important decisions for business development.
Let’s consider the essence of the actions that occur in the BI system in more detail:
- Data collection by the system. BI programs extract data from various sources, for example, from Excel tables, ERP systems, and CRM systems. The functionality of the BI system provides the ability to collect data both automatically and at a specific user request.
- Data processing by the system. At the next stage, the BI platform or algorithm converts the collected data to a single format that can be worked with in the future. After this, analysis, structuring, and determination of dependencies and patterns are carried out.
- Visualization. The last step of this process is that the system creates reports and visualizes them. There are different options for visualization. The platform can present information in the form of a presentation, dashboard, or graph.
Who can benefit from ready-made reports prepared by a BI system? In fact, they are needed by almost all specialists in the company – analysts, heads of the organization, and senior managers of the department. The platform can prepare reports for different purposes and create dashboards in the program for specialists working in different areas. Thanks to the clear and simple presentation of information, specialists can analyze data much faster, and a lot of time and resources are saved, since there is no need to collect and compare information, and then manually calculate indicators. All this will be done by the BI system (process the data and visualize them).
What Tasks Do BI Systems Solve?
BI systems allow businesses to clearly present information on key indicators to identify problems, search for trends, generate forecasts, and improve operations in general.
The main functionality of a BI system:
- processing and analyzing any data that a business needs;
- collecting, structuring, and storing information in one place;
- processing large amounts of information that can then be used to forecast sales or step-by-step develop a business strategy;
- preparing reports and visualizing;
- modeling solutions and evaluating their effectiveness;
- detection of vulnerabilities;
- systematization of data obtained over the entire period of the company’s operation;
- secure access from all devices.
How Does BI System Implementation Occur?
BI system implementation is carried out by BI analysts, software developers, and all specialists who will use this tool in their work.
The process of BI system implementation can be divided into several main stages:
- Defining requirements. Specialists who will use the BI system functionality determine what information needs to be analyzed, what reports and tables they need, how detailed the information should be, and how often the data will be updated. At this stage, the BI analyst collects requirements from all specialists, structures the information, and thinks through what the system functionality will look like.
- Defining data. Together with future users of the system, the BI analyst specifies the data that will be required to generate reports. This is the information that will be displayed on dashboards.
- Defining data sources. At this stage, it is important to determine where the system will collect the necessary data to calculate indicators. These can be sales automation programs, various tables, and CRM systems. It is also important to evaluate how correctly the source transmits data. If there are problems with this, the system needs to be improved.
- Selecting a BI system. A very important step, where, based on user requirements and selected sources for collecting information, it is decided which system is best for the company. There are two options here – buy a ready-made solution or start development from scratch.
- Configuration. After the system has been selected, it is important to configure the data warehouse and ensure integration with the sources from which the information will be collected. BI developers and analysts are responsible for this.
- Testing. This is a very important stage. Here, the correctness of the reports and their detailing to the desired level are checked.
- Training. Launching the system is only half the battle, it is necessary to train all users so that specialists are comfortable working, and the functionality of this tool is used to the maximum.
After the implementation of the BI system, analysts and developers continue to support its operation. In the process, questions may arise about the use of the technology, requests for improvement may appear, or problems with the functionality may arise that need to be resolved.
Final Thoughts
BI systems are not just tools for data analysis, but full-fledged assistants in business development. They help businesses increase process transparency, optimize costs, and improve strategic planning. Cooperation with professionals, such as a data analytics consulting agency, allows you to customize BI platforms for specific business needs and maximize their potential. If you are looking for a reliable data analytics service provider, we recommend paying attention to N-iX.
