Business Intelligence – Why Do You Need It?

Are you constantly trying to better analyze your data to secure your organization’s future? Do you feel like you struggle with keeping a focus on important business functions, like streamlining operations, increasing your revenue, and outpacing competition? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, it’s time for you to reevaluate your business information. You need to ability to determine where to concentrate your efforts, but where do you start?

Since you can’t be constantly checking every detail of what’s done, you want to monitor your operations and be alerted to potential issues when they occur. You need to be able to focus on quickly finding and resolving potential problems without getting sidetracked. Fortunately, Business Intelligence can enable you to do just that. With Business Intelligence, you can identify new ways to leverage opportunities, despite the current uncertainty of our economy.

So, what is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence allows your organization to better understand, monitor, analyze, and predict what is occurring in the overall environment of your company. It allows you to turn your data into useful information and distribute it to those who need it, wherever they need it, by whatever means they choose (tablet, smart phone, etc). Essentially, BI saves you time and allows you to make better informed decisions. Since you can combine data from a wide variety of sources for an integrated, up to date view, BI is a win/win solution.  Here are a few examples of what Business Intelligence can do for your organization:

• Identify your best selling products to compare against all your distribution channels
• Identify which of your customers are cutting back on their purchases
• Monitor social media sites to analyze and gain insight
• Catalog & store current historical reports and analytics to use in the future for any decision making processes
• Implement dashboards & scorecards so that executives can recognize operational exceptions and KPIs
• Monitor a marketing campaign in real time – and as a result get back analytics as to whether or not it is successful, should be tweaked, or should be cancelled
• Track customer orders and desired ship dates to properly adjust the production cycle
• Integrate data from spreadsheets to provide consistency and “a single version of the truth”
• Align your daily operations with strategic objectives to keep them in agreement
• Make data-driven informed decisions

So now that you know what BI can do for you, how do you know whether or not you need it? If you experience the opposite of any of the above points, then you most likely don’t have the information you need. Often, you will experience limited operational flexibility if you don’t have BI in place. Because of this, you don’t have as much insight into what’s going on in your company, therefore prohibiting you from quickly reacting to negative situations as promptly as you’d like to. With a limited scope of analysis, you can’t achieve a complete view of your customer base and can’t integrate your data into your CRM system. Basically, without BI, you can’t meet your client demands as your company grows.

Simply put, if you’re looking to improve the overall quality of your business and decision making process, as well as the overall effectiveness of your organization, you need Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence can help you make better decisions, better manage your business, analyze and understand your organization’s plans and results, and provide insight into what’s working correctly while identifying potential problem areas. Contact Third Wave today and get on a path to strong Business Intelligence today!