Decision making is one of the major responsibilities of the leadership and the mid-level management team. Quite often the decision making doesn't happen effectively because the information is not available when it’s needed. That results in not making the decision, delaying it until the information is available, or making a bad decision in the absence of data, which are all harmful to a business and can result in some major problems.
What is BI?
Not having the right information in the right format at the right time is one of the major challenges in today's business. Even though a lot of information and data are generated and gathered through different business platforms like ERP systems, quality, sales and other systems, the ability of the existing tools is very limited when it comes to data crunching, reporting, and creating business intelligence. To fill this gap, a new category of cloud-based software solutions was created to help with data analytics and data analysis. These solutions are categorized as business intelligence or dashboard making tools. Modern business intelligence tools can help your organization to be more efficient with data analytics and take advantage of hidden insights in your data.
How does BI work?
Regardless of what platform or how many platforms your business uses, you can access your entire data and generate reports and dashboards that will automatically update with your data. The source of data could be a simple excel file that a business unit maintains, or a sophisticated ODBC or API connection to your ERP or any other platform that your business is currently using. After those connections are established, the next step is to build queries and reports that are desired for various business functions.
Powerful and effective analysis for data-driven decision making
The beauty of these solutions is that everybody within the organization will work with the same original data and can generate the right custom report to meet their needs. You can do various analyses and create live reports that can be drilled down for any function within your organization. Different reports can be built to generate powerful insights from your sales data, production, finance, and so on. These reports are interactive, so one can drill down and deep dive to identify root cause of specific problems if desired. As an example, you can drill down from the GP of your entire business down to GP of specific market segments, specific customers, or even contracts, easily, without needing to request someone to crunch the data for you. And if you need to review that information again in a week or month, that information is readily available to you.
Gain real-time visibility and save significant time for your best resources
The same data can be used to generate live and real-time executive dashboards that provides effortless visibility into the business performance. No more requesting and waiting to receive the information that you need to make decisions. No more management data crunching to create charts and slides for leadership meetings. Dashboards and reports will be created once, and they will be at your fingertip anytime that you need them. This is extremely valuable and saves significant amount of time for all levels of management within the organization. As the name suggests, BI tools can help you convert your big data into business intelligence that help you run the business more effectively.
Techam Solutions has partnered with several clients to implement appropriate business intelligence solution across their organization. We have learnt that many companies are not aware of these solutions and do not know how beneficial these low-cost tools could be to their daily operations. Please contact us today if you are interested to learn how a business intelligence solution could benefit your operations.