Top 11 Benefits of Business Intelligence

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, data is highly critical for decision-making. And the amount of data generated by organizations is growing exponentially. During 2022, the total data created and consumed globally was 97 zettabytes, and it could reach 181 zettabytes by 2025 ^[1]. It is where business intelligence (BI) comes in. By leveraging BI tools and technologies, organizations can turn data into valuable insights, enabling them to make informed decisions that drive growth, profitability, and competitive advantage.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the benefits of business intelligence & why it’s a must-have for any modern business. From improved decision-making to increased efficiency and profitability, we’ll dive into how business intelligence can help your enterprise thrive. We’ll also discuss the importance of BI, components, tools and more.

So, let’s explore the world of business intelligence and discover how it can help you unlock your organization’s full potential. Before that, let’s learn what it is and why it is essential.

What is Business Intelligence Software?

Business intelligence software (BI software) is designed to help organizations analyze and understand their data, to make informed business decisions. It collects, processes, and analyzes vast unstructured data from internal and external systems. BI software typically includes features for data visualization, reporting, dashboards, and ad-hoc query tools, among others. The main goal of BI software is to provide organizations with the ability to make better and data-driven decisions, increase revenue, improve operational efficiency, and gain competitive advantages. It’s worth noting that many BI software solutions integrate with other software systems, including CRM, ERP, and accounting software.

Why Is Business Intelligence Important?

BI software is essential because it enables organizations to leverage their data to gain insights and make more informed decisions. With the amount of data, organizations generate growing exponentially, it can be challenging for decision-makers to sift through all the information and extract meaningful insights. BI software helps to simplify this process by providing a single, consolidated view of an organization’s data that can be easily analyzed and visualized.

Further, it can also improve operational efficiency, identify areas for cost savings, and help organizations to identify new business opportunities. By providing a comprehensive view of an organization’s data, BI software can also help break down silos between departments and facilitate more effective collaboration.

It is essential to understand & analyze your organization’s data to improve business processes & strategies. Moreover, business intelligence helps organizations improve work efficiency and reduce operational costs.

It also helps derive;

• Market trends & actionable insights
• Understand consumer behavior and shopping patterns
• Identify potential business challenges
• Optimizing the operational methods

Here are some statistics that suggest the growing importance of business intelligence in today’s business environment.

• The revenue in the Business Intelligence Software market could grow at a CAGR of 5.83% and reach USD 34.16 Billion by 2028 from the projected USD 25.73 Billion in 2023^[2].
• The international Business Intelligence Market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.1% from USD 27.11 Billion in 2022 to USD 54.27 Billion by 2030^[3].
• The Mobile Business Intelligence Market could grow from USD 13.6 Billion in 2022 to USD 96 Billion in 2032 at a CAGR of 22.2% ^[4].

Top 11 Benefits of Business Intelligence

Enterprise BI tools and techniques enable organizations to analyze and transform their data into valuable insights. With the help of BI tools, companies can make informed decisions, gain a competitive advantage, and improve their overall performance.

Some of the key benefits of using business intelligence software include:

• Fast, Accurate Reporting: BI enables employees to track KPIs using customized reports or templates, generating reports in real-time, providing the most relevant information to help companies act quickly, and improving the accuracy of their reporting.
• Better Forecasting: BI tools can analyze historical data and predict future trends. It can help businesses to anticipate changes in demand, identify potential risks, and make more accurate forecasts about future performance.
• Enhanced Collaboration: BI tools provide a centralized platform where teams can access and share data, collaborate on analysis, and develop actionable insights. It enables breaking down silos within the organization and improves cross-functional collaboration.
• Competitive Advantage: BI tools better understand businesses’ target market, customer preferences, and competition. It can be used to develop more effective marketing campaigns, identify new business opportunities, and make better-informed decisions that give the company a competitive advantage. It enables companies to track industry changes, anticipate competitor moves, and understand market, regulatory, legal, and competitor issues, ultimately gaining a competitive advantage.
• Better Return-On-Investment: A business can generate more revenue and expansion through better ROI. The CRM feature in the business intelligence system improves sales efficiency and customer experience. It makes it easy to handle ongoing & after-sales services. As a result, there will be a significant boost to the company’s ROI. BI provides critical insights into customer behavior, enabling companies to optimize their marketing strategies, remove low-performing products, and identify cost reduction opportunities, ultimately increasing revenue.
• Improved Decision-Making: BI tools provide real-time, accurate, and actionable insights that help businesses make better decisions. These insights are derived from analyzing large amounts of data, which allows organizations to identify patterns, trends, and correlations that would otherwise be difficult to detect.
• Valuable Insights: Business intelligence software collects data from all company verticals. It identifies the patterns & trends to draw helpful business insights. Moreover, sharing this filtered information across company departments will be easy. Business intelligence reporting tools are valuable resources for monitoring various aspects of a business, including revenue, losses, gains, employee productivity, and individual and team-based performance. They provide comprehensive insights into both positive and negative aspects of the business. By leveraging these tools, organizations can effortlessly track metrics and stay current on current and future trends by configuring alerts, receiving real-time information on key performance indicators (KPIs), and identifying potential issues that may have gone unnoticed.
• Reduced Risks: BI offers valuable business insights to help companies make data-driven choices, eliminating guesswork in decision-making, ensuring the effective use of resources, and ultimately gaining a competitive advantage. It becomes easy to check the performance and success ratio of various programs. That helps to address the business challenges before they appear.
• Increased Productivity: BI helps businesses eliminate bottlenecks, refine processes, automate daily tasks, prioritize activities without manual labor, and stay organized, ultimately increasing productivity and improving customer service.
• Enhanced Customer Service: BI sources and compiles repeat customer data, enabling companies to personalize their messaging, improve their shopping experiences, and provide better customer service, improving customer satisfaction.
• Performance Management: BI solutions help businesses leverage performance management by tracking and implementing data-based goals like sales targets or delivery times. So, companies can track progress daily, which can improve organizational productivity. BI also provides readily accessible information through dashboards and real-time data, which saves time and allows for immediate problem-solving. Using BI’s visual analytics capabilities, professionals can track goal fulfillment and significantly boost performance.

Now that you know the advantages of business intelligence, let’s explore how it works.

How Does Business Intelligence Work?

Business Intelligence combines technologies, business applications, and industry practices. It uses data from CRM, sales performance dashboards, and other company resources. It collects, transforms, analyzes, and represents business information meaningfully so enterprises can make informed decisions.

Here is a brief overview of how business intelligence works:

• Data Collection: BI collects data from different sources, like databases, spreadsheets, and other data repositories. This data can come from various departments within the enterprise and external sources like social media, market research, and customer feedback.
• Data Storage: Once the data is collected, it is stored in a data warehouse or mart. This centralized repository can store large amounts of data and allows for efficient retrieval.
• Data Cleaning: Before analysis can begin, the data must be cleaned and transformed to ensure accuracy and consistency.
• Data Analysis: The integrated data is analyzed to identify patterns, trends, and insights. It could be done using various analytical tools like data mining, statistical analysis, and machine learning. The collected data is then integrated and transformed into a unified format that is easy to analyze.
• Data Visualization: Once the data is analyzed, it is presented in a visual format that is easy to understand. It could be in the form of charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports.
• Reporting & Sharing: The insights and visualizations are shared with relevant organizational stakeholders, such as executives, managers, and front-line employees, to drive informed decision-making and improve business operations.

Finally, enterprises can use the insights gained from the data analysis to make informed decisions. These decisions can relate to various aspects of the business, like marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Business intelligence is an ongoing process, and organizations continually collect and analyze data to gain insights into their business operations and improve decision-making.

Types of Business Intelligence Software and Tools

BI systems & tools help gather, store, analyze, and present data to support organizational decision-making. Here are some critical aspects you may want to consider:

• Reporting and Querying: Reporting tools allow businesses to generate reports and run queries on data. Querying tools help users extract specific data from a spreadsheet or database by running SQL queries. BI tools provide reports, dashboards, and scorecards that summarize the data in a format that is easy to understand and use
• Dashboards and visualization: They allow users to present data in charts, graphs, and other visual representations, which can help identify trends and patterns in data.
• Data Gathering: BI systems gather data from various sources, such as transactional databases, CRM systems, ERP systems, spreadsheets, social media, and more.
• Data Storage: BI systems store data in data warehouses or data marts, which are optimized for analytical processing and can handle large volumes of data. Data warehousing software helps collect and store enormous datasets from multiple sources in a centralized location, helping businesses manage and access data more efficiently.
• Data Analysis: BI tools use techniques such as data mining, data visualization, and statistical analysis to identify patterns and trends in the data. Data mining and predictive analytics tools help analyze vast datasets and recognize patterns and trends not immediately apparent.
• Predictive Analytics: BI tools can also use predictive analytics to forecast future trends and recommend future actions.

Some popular BI tools include Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle BI, and IBM Cognos. These tools are designed to be user-friendly, allowing business users to interact with the data, build reports, and perform ad-hoc analysis without IT support.

At Rishabh Software, our team has experience utilizing Power BI, Tableau, and Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence to build enterprise BI solutions. Please read our blog on enterprise business intelligence to learn more about the above-listed tools.

Real-World Examples of Business Intelligence in Use

Enterprises are increasingly adopting business intelligence due to customer demands, competition, and fast-changing market scenarios. BI helps them generate data that facilitates creating a growth strategy. Here are some real-world examples of business intelligence in use:

From the Manufacturing Industry:

• Coca-Cola: One of the world’s largest beverage companies adopted business intelligence tools throughout its organization to improve its different business processes^[5]. For instance, BI helped them to automate their manual reporting procedures at its largest independent bottling partner Coca-Cola Bottling Co. and served the needs of various audiences and users within the company.

From the Media and Entertainment Industry:

• Netflix: Leading OTT platform leverages the advantages of business intelligence to earn satisfied customers by improvising their viewing experience^[6]. It analyzes the search history of every viewer on the platform, figures out what they like to watch, and offers them the content of their interest without searching for it.

From the Retail Industry:

• Walmart: Leading multinational retail corporation uses data to quickly build and launch new customer shopping experiences ^[7]. It analyzes consumer data and identifies information about purchase histories. BI enables them to create product placement strategies for brick-and-mortar locations, along with sales & marketing plans for enhancing the experience of online and mobile customers.

From the Urban Transportation Industry:

• Uber: Leading rental cab company uses business intelligence tools to get real-time data on traffic, cab demand, and much more^[8]. It helps them raise fares during peak hours and increase profit. The users can make decisions based on their unique local conditions and serve customers better.

From the Hospitality Industry:

• Marriott International: A global brand of full-service hotels and resorts that uses Big Data technologies and business intelligence to forecast demand and determine each room’s value throughout the year^[9]. Its in-house department, Marriot Digital Services, uses data-driven technologies to optimize strategy, streamline its system, and identify growth opportunities.

From the Travel Industry:

• American Express: Global Business Travel (GBT) of American Express uses business intelligence tools to analyze travel and customer data^[10]. It helps them identify travel patterns, recognize cost-cutting opportunities, renegotiate rates with preferred suppliers, enhance their duty of care obligations, and boost compliance.

Listed above are examples of how enterprises use BI tools to create a competitive edge and accelerate growth. Additionally, BI can provide a wide range of benefits to various industries. Here are some of them:

• Retail: Supports analyzing customer data to improve their marketing and sales efforts. By understanding customer preferences, shopping habits, and purchasing behavior, retailers can optimize their inventory management, promotions, and pricing strategies to increase revenue and customer loyalty.
• Healthcare: Enables providers to analyze patient data to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Healthcare providers can identify patterns and trends in patient data to optimize their treatment plans, lower readmission rates, and improve overall patient satisfaction.
• Finance: Allows financial institutions to manage risk and improve their profitability. Institutions can identify potential risks and opportunities by analyzing financial data, optimizing investment strategies, and improving financial performance.
• Manufacturing: Aids manufacturers in improving their production efficiency and reducing costs. They can identify bottlenecks, optimize their supply chain, and improve operational performance.
• Hospitality: Offers hospitality businesses to optimize customer experience and increase revenue. By analyzing customer data, hospitality businesses can personalize their services, improve their marketing efforts, and identify new revenue streams.
• Education: Institutions can improve student performances and outcomes using BI tools. By analyzing student data, academic institutions can identify areas for improvement, optimize their curriculum, and provide targeted support to students who need it.

How Does Rishabh Software Help Leverage The Benefits Of Business Intelligence For Enterprises?

We are an experienced business intelligence services provider. We offer a range of BI application development services to integrate multi-source data and the application of analytics techniques to extract insights from the input records automatically. It would include BI consulting, data warehousing, reporting and data visualization, migration and modernization, and business intelligence integration. We utilize a comprehensive tech stack that comprises data visualization technologies like – Power BI, Tableau, SQL reporting service & data warehousing using – MySQL, SQL Server, and more.

Our Success Stories:

Case Study 1: Power BI Healthcare Financial Dashboard to Optimize Decision Making

A leading North America-based health & wellness innovator offering personalized hormone therapy solutions wanted to develop a single-view platform for data modeling and visualization to extract crucial insights and better track performance, sales & revenue. We developed a healthcare financial dashboard utilizing Power BI for CFO tracking with relevant KPIs. It includes critical insights on revenues, enables other business stakeholders & managers with role-based access to report creation & analysis, and integrates with the data warehouse to create reports.

Key takeaways;

• 84% lower efforts to monitor performance
• 43% ease in tracking managers’ performances
• 47% enhanced decision-making

Learn how our Power BI Healthcare KPI Dashboard Development helped the client.

Case Study 2: Sales Dashboard Development Using Power BI to Drive Optimum Results

A Middle East-based retail brand operating across 40 countries with multiple business units wanted to create a holistic solution that offers complete visibility into business sales performance. Our team built a sales dashboard using Microsoft Power BI. It helps our client holistically monitor key sales KPIs. It covers essential metrics like profit margin, region-wise sales performances, and industry segments for short and long-term with forecasting to enable informed decision-making.

Key takeaways;

• 100% visibility of sales operations to map trends
• Over 40% forecast accuracy of future KPIs
• 4x improvement in effective decision making

Read more about how our Sales Dashboard Development Using Power BI helped the client.

Concluding Thoughts

Business intelligence offers numerous benefits to organizations. Implementing a robust business intelligence system can be a game-changer for any organization looking to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment. And now that you know why business intelligence is important, why you should use it for your enterprise, and the key benefits of BI and its tools, it’s time to act. It provides valuable insights and helps make data-driven decisions that lead to improved performance, increased revenue, and better customer satisfaction. With business intelligence, organizations can also identify trends, monitor their competitors, and respond quickly to changes in the market. Furthermore, it helps companies optimize operations, reduce costs, and streamline processes. It would help to partner with a highly skilled and experienced company and build a custom BI solution.

FAQ

What are the components of Business Intelligence Software

BI comprises the following critical components:

• Data Source Integration: BI software integrates data from multiple sources such as databases, spreadsheets, data warehouses, and data lakes. It also includes Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes to transform and clean data to make it suitable for analysis.
• Data Warehousing: It involves storing vast amounts of data in ways beneficial to other divisions within the company.
• Data Modeling: This component focuses on creating a logical and physical data model. BI software provides tools for designing data models and defining relationships between entities.
• OLAP: Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) allows monitoring data by sorting and aggregating it strategically. Specific software products facilitate this component, and a certification in business intelligence can help business owners use data to adjust overall business processes.
• Advanced Analytics or Corporate Performance Management (CPM): Allows analyzing the statistics of specific products or services. For example, a food chain can modify menu offers locally, regionally, or nationally by exploring specific items’ sales data.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/
2. https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/enterprise-software/business-intelligence-software/worldwide
3. https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/business-intelligence-bi-market-103742
4. https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/news/mobile-business-intelligence-market-raise-at-a-cagr-of-22-2-surpass-usd-96-bn-by-2032.html
5. https://www.icmrindia.org/casestudies/catalogue/IT%20and%20Systems/ITSY112.htm
6. https://plainenglish.io/blog/how-netflix-uses-data-analytics-data-science-general-research-case-study-4d525b881038
7. https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/articles/analytics/how-walmart-makes-data-work-for-its-customers.html
8. https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-eu-2019/public/schedule/detail/74434.html
9. https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/marriott-data-driven-customer-experience-for-decades-at-scale%EF%BF%BC/
10. https://www.amexglobalbusinesstravel.com/business-travel/select/data-analytics-reporting/