Every day, managers in all industries make critical business decisions based on limited information. Today, when competition is fierce and clients are hard to attract, a business needs more than just spreadsheets and a good feeling to keep operating at maximum efficiency. Business intelligence solutions can meet and overcome those considerable challenges.

We can all see that the economic environment is becoming more challenging every day and, as a company, you need to pay much more attention to client behavior, new markets and opportunities, as well as investments in operations, sales, marketing, and other systems to support growth, all while keeping a close eye on ROI. All this means that we are being confronted with more and more data.

Business Intelligence (BI) platforms can provide solutions for many business development, marketing, and operational issues. BI helps any organization gather, analyze, and leverage a wide variety of data in order to gain a competitive edge and increase its visibility in a crowded market.

By incorporating a Business Intelligence solution into your daily business operations, you can solve a wide variety of problems, from high costs to low customer satisfaction. Every small, mid-sized, and large business can benefit from BI, especially now, as Business Intelligence platforms are not only more affordable than they were in the past but also easier to implement.

Main issues that Business Intelligence can help you solve

Poor Performance Management

You have a great product or service, your visionary approach is making a difference, but how is your business doing now or over a two-year period?

When you have access to meaningful analysis and reporting, you can make well-informed and insightful, long-term strategic and tactical decisions quickly and efficiently. With Business Intelligence, you gain insight into understanding and analyzing your business’ performance and opportunities on a deeper level. You can track and analyze KPIs against key business goals to gain a better understanding of how your business is performing today – rather than at a time when it’s too late to impact performance.

Furthermore, it will be easier to take proactive measures to improve performance and meet profit expectations.

Slow Market Response

A.K.A. losing money right now. One of the biggest strengths of having a BI solution in your company is having the ability to look into what the market is purchasing now. You can view reports on a daily basis instead of waiting until the end of the month or quarter, enabling you to respond quickly to unpredictable situations and market demands.

For example, you can see how many pieces of certain products were sold and in which location, which can help your sales personnel cross-sell and upsell goods at the most appropriate client touchpoints. This kind of data can be utilized to develop an advantage over the competition and increase profit.

Losing Customers

With Business Intelligence, you can gain valuable insight into your customer behavior through certain metrics and analyses. You can create detailed guest profiles that include interests, preferences, history, and more. Armed with this information, you can anticipate clients’ needs and offer more personalized services or create a more memorable customer experience and build long-term relationships.

Chaos in Day-to-Day Operations

From financial data in spreadsheets with special macros to sales and performance metrics on different reports, dealing with all kinds of data in everyday operations can create chaos.

Integrating Business Intelligence into your day-to-day operations can improve alignment with a single source for accurate financial and operational information and simplify collaboration and sharing.

Having a single, central location allows all teams to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), access reports, analyze your data, and share documents. The data is gathered electronically and delivered in an easy-to-understand format, allowing even the most non-technical users to determine the factors that drive day-to-day activity.

Wasting Time on Compiling Multiple Systems Instead of Analyzing Data

Many organizations throw away valuable time and energy looking for pertinent information from within their different data sources. Much time is invested in converting, merging, and reporting data, discussing whether it is accurate, not to mention that desktop spreadsheets do not enable real-time data sharing and updating.

With a BI system in place, all of the data required comes from one source and can be accessed from one dashboard and converted into a report. This saves both time and energy while making the process much more efficient.

Extracting data from these multiple sources and bringing it together into a centralized data warehouse can make it much easier to gain quick and reliable insights.

Reliance on Tech Teams to Develop Custom Reports

Many traditional data tools are so complicated that only a few individuals within the company know how to handle them. In addition, every time you need a custom report you have to rely on your tech-skilled colleagues.

By creating a personalized Business Intelligence solution, many key people throughout an organization can gain easy access to understandable and meaningful data. Research has shown that organizations that democratize the use of these tools across the business by making them more user-friendly achieve a significantly higher ROI.

Limited Access to Data

Mobile devices are omnipresent in our daily lives and are changing the way we do business. Why not use them to make a better decision faster? With a BI solution, everyone in the organization, including managers, senior executives, and functional teams, can access and analyze up-to-date information when they need it, wherever they are, on a range of different devices.

You can share information efficiently and effectively with people across your organization and make better decisions.

We’ve never had such advanced technology as we do today. It would be a great loss not to take advantage of as much of this as possible, especially in today’s economic environment where the competition is strong and clients are more demanding.

A business intelligence solution can help a team identify new growth opportunities – for now and in the future – and take advantage of meaningful data that can help it prosper, even in a difficult and uncertain economic situation.