5 Benefits of Business Intelligence Software

Over the last decade, many companies have invested in business intelligence (BI) software to help them gain a better understanding of key business drivers and to predict future performance.

The sector continues to grow as companies are willing to invest their resources into a business intelligence solution that can help them be more efficient, identify areas suitable for cost savings and recognise new business opportunities.

Here are 5 ways business intelligence software can benefit your business:

1. Actionable Intelligence

One of the main reasons BI is gaining so much attention is due to its ability to provide actionable intelligence.

“It is increasingly important to give business users tools that can provide simple and easy access to both the data in their databases and the mountains of new data from geolocation coordinates, click-streams, apps and devices, server logs and so on via Hadoop,” said Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks. “These modern applications are key to uncovering actionable intelligence which ultimately drives business transformation.”

2. Information Integration

Data tends to be spread throughout the business and stored in various silos. When data is siloed and various departments in a company use different data, it can result in costly errors, which can hurt profits. BI tools remove the barriers between those silos so that a single source of truth is created based on multiple data sources. This provides an accurate and integrated forecast for the entire organisation.

3. Real-Time Decision Making

Moving away from static analysis of past operations, BI platforms bring analytical capabilities to operational data in order to make decisions as business happens. BI tools provide executives with the ability to act on current data insights in real time. This results in decisions of greater business value and enables companies to perform business agility.

4. Data Visualisation

In today’s fast-paced business environment, we need to be able to absorb information quickly, memorise the important insights and share our findings. BI tools transform data into a visual story, which is easy to understand by everyone. The software provides context on insights as to why the graphic is important, this allows executives to connect the dots and identify correlations.

5. Performance management

BI also helps track, manage and implement performance goals. With BI tools, businesses can input data-based goals such as sales goals or target delivery time and track progress daily. This tracking mechanism is known as performance management, and it provides some of the most effective and easily implemented goal management functions.

BI applications make information readily accessible that would usually take hours or weeks to track down and organise. With BI’s instinctive visual analytics capabilities, executives can track goal fulfilment and use that information to measure overall organisational productivity. When properly implemented, BI tools can boost your performance significantly.

Final thoughts

There are a variety of advantages a business intelligence software provides. It is a rising industry that has many proven benefits when correctly implemented. It enables users to gain targeted insight into your companies past, present and future to make informed business decisions. To accomplish this, BI software collects, organises, mines and visualises vital KPI’s. It eliminates waste and guesswork, promotes efficiency, and improves sales intelligence. This powerful blend of features and benefits of BI software offers users a competitive advantage that can make all the difference in the modern age.