5 Ways to Use Business Intelligence in Your Company
In recent years, many organisations have been turning to machine learning business intelligence to help further and grow the company.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of using algorithms and software to analyse business data to generate insights that shape a company’s future strategy and inform business decisions. BI software presents business information in the form of reports, graphs, tables and maps that users can analyse and draw their own conclusions from.
BI can sometimes be referred to as ‘descriptive analytics’ because it only shows present and historical data. Decisions are still made by key personnel based on the data in front of them.
So how can you use business intelligence in your company? Here are five key examples.
1. Use Customer Data to Increase Sales
Customer data is crucial to helping drive sales, and there’s so much you can use. Consumers and clients interact with businesses in various ways including calls, emails, social media, chatbots and more. With so many touchpoints to draw data from, there’s plenty to mull over when making decisions. Business intelligence software can integrate this data to give an organisation a complete overview of their customer base.
BI tools allow you to identify where sales are doing well and where improvements need to be made. You can see how successful certain campaigns were with your customers and how unsuccessful ones can be avoided in the future. Tracking your sales data can unearth trends and potential opportunities that will help grow your business.
Armed with this information, your sales team can perform to a higher standard. Not only will they find ways to increase profit in your existing customer base, but also start to consider ways to grow that base.
2. Improve Efficiency
Every business owner wants a more efficient company and business intelligence can deliver it. With a better understanding of trends, owners and managers can help build the resources and infrastructure for a more efficient business. You will be able to propose better business models, processes and methods that improve every level of the business.
For example, manually entering data is a time-consuming process that is prone to human error. A well-configured business intelligence tool eliminates the need for a person to do administrative work, allowing artificial intelligence to speed up data entry and calculations. With quick report generation and data visualisation, all the information you require is in the BI software. With an efficient reporting system in place, you can make key profitable decisions faster.
3. Better Financial Management
Financial analysis can be complicated, but BI simplifies it. With the right BI setup, you can combine your financial statements with real-time data that will support you to improve your revenue and manage expenditures.
BI software gives you dashboards, graphs and charts based on your profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheets so you can better oversee your company’s financial health. It will also help solve managing rebates, which is usually a chaotic process, but BI makes it easier. Remove the need for spreadsheets and have a rounded view of them all.
4. Inventory Management
Poor inventory management can leave you with too much stock, which is damaging to your bottom line. BI solutions can analyse your supply chain to ensure your inventory is at the required levels. It can also spot changes in seasonal sales and identify consumer demand.
These are ways that BI can help improve your inventory management:
- Stock levels - quick and easy view on current stock levels for a product.
- Overstock - compare historical sales data with current stock. If you sell very little of a product but have a lot of stock in-house, this is overstock.
- Understock - conversely, if data shows sales are increasing for a product or if a product has a long lead time, you risk understocking. You will not fulfil customer orders this way.
- Deadstock - inventory that is on your shelves and not being sold costs you money. BI can alert you of dead stock.
With all this information to hand, you can make data-driven decisions to avoid wasted stock. If you can promise to deliver products efficiently, you can secure big sales with clients that will drive revenue. On the other hand, if you fail to deliver you will lose out to your competitors.
5. Free Up Your IT Department
IT departments can spend a lot of time pulling data and creating reports for various departments. With BI solutions, you can generate reports that drill down on the information that is needed - and an IT professional isn’t even needed!
IT departments can be freed up from running reports under pressure, which can commonly lead to errors. BI is self-service, allowing staff to control the data they need. Meanwhile, IT staff can contribute to improving and growing the business.
Business intelligence software can also combat data breaches and malware attacks. Powerful analytics combined with advanced security tools helps build cyber resilience with the ever-present threat posed by cyber criminals.
Nasstar can support your business by implementing business intelligence and other IT solutions into your business as part of our professional services offering.
Get in touch today to reap the benefits of innovative software solutions.
