Business Intelligence’s impact on driving better decision making

This is a guest post.

Business Intelligence can be interpreted as the technological process for one to scan and inspect raw data for gathering actionable insights and converting that insight into an informed decision for business. Using BI solutions companies are not only able to study their past performance but also predict the future trends.

BI practices are able to increase performance of their activities as they are more focused and data driven, leading to much higher results in performance and outputs. The combination of new generation analytical tools and machine learning has given BI a huge boost to using raw data for insights.

Let’s understand how BI has impacted the business world by allowing for more informed decision making:

Business intelligence software like Microsoft Power BI, comes with interactive dashboards and visualizations options for looking at different components of business in a meaningful way. It increases the understanding of different aspects in new light, which are often overlooked while working with excel sheets.

Choosing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for your organization

There are many reasons why a company would choose to go for Business Intelligence solutions in the first place. But before choosing to go ahead they often wonder if this will live up to the hype companies claim and get the maximum benefits after investment of money and time.

The main benefits of implementing a BI solution are following:

● Analytics of past data for future trends
● Increasing the accuracy of decisions
● Better performance in sales and marketing
● Improved pricing structure and offers

According to a Power BI consultant organizations that have implemented Microsoft Power BI have seen an increase in accuracy in their decision making process. Planning and analysis have become a data driven process, leading to highest accuracy in predicting any trends from the start.

Apart from increasing the accuracy of decisions of their analysis of different trends, companies have also seen a positive trend in estimating or predicting consumer behavior.
Business intelligence has also impacted how companies create the pricing structure of their products which gives them a competitive edge, leading to higher sales and profits. But the most highly impacted are because of Business Intelligence is decision making process:

Decision making and Business Intelligence

Previously people would turn to excel sheets to manually input data to make them any sense from their organizational data. But there are some problems when it comes to working with excel:

• Human error as a result of manual input
• No guarantee that data is accurate
• No way of sharing data from one platform and keeping teams together
• No meaningful insights from past performance of organization

Because of the following reason business owners had no clarity to make an informed choice for optimal performance of their decisions resulting in results which were not satisfactory.

Organizations which lack BI capabilities underperformed and with respect to their competitors.
But providing insights using BI gives people the ability to take decisions which are based on data and the chances of success increases relatively.

Like in any case, the decisiveness increases when an organization takes decisions over the period of time. It is effective to provide the decision maker in an organization with BI tools that helps take informed decisions.

The current generation tools, such as Microsoft Power BI provide accurate Power BI reports and actionable insights to organizations which are both experienced and inexperienced with decision making. As the results, Business intelligence tools create more and more accurate predictions making organizations feel more confident in the process of decision making.

Some of the areas where organization get better with decision making are following:

• Sales prediction
• Marketing activities predictions
• Better inventory decisions
• Future goals expectations

Businesses are better equipped to understand their audience after studying their buying patterns, how they react to certain marketing activities and what different touch points affect the customer buying experience like coupons or pricing structure. If an organization can understand their audiences purchasing habits, then organizations can plot a best course of actions to be implemented. This takes away the guesswork out of the picture and organizations attain focus on what counts.

Organizations and companies are better equipped to monitor different trends among their audience and can develop marketing strategies around that to capture an audience and make most sales. With Business Intelligence power in hand an organization can predict the future based on statistical data. The stats from data can be used to guide the organization future and set long term goals to achieve.

Conclusion

By depending on data driven decision making processes, and ability to monitor real time reports from a single dashboard, organizations have streamlined multiple processes. This has made them collaborate better and discover better strategies to implement all while giving them a competitive edge over the niche market.