Making Decisions That Increase Your Success [5 Reading Tips]

Business Intelligence Reading Tips — Source: Unsplash/Adeolu Eletu

Purchase histories, website visits, sales figures: companies rarely lack data. But which data is really relevant when it comes to specific issues such as campaign optimisation, location planning or resource savings – and how can it be processed in a structured manner?

Business intelligence solutions support your company in bringing together existing data, analysing it depending on the task at hand and presenting it clearly. This enables you to make decisions more quickly, easily and effectively and to optimise customer experiences as well as internal business processes.

BI Solutions Process Data

BI systems facilitate the entire data processing procedure for your company. Relevant data is usually stored in different places such as CRM, ERP or PIM systems – or it even has to be drawn from external sources, e.g. social media statistics. In a cache, this data is transformed using »Extract, Transform, Load« (ETL) processes and made available in a central database, known as the data warehouse.

In addition, BI software automatically cleanses your database of duplicate records and misinformation. This helped the software company Ellie Mae conduct an improved sales and financial analysis and identify better cross-sales opportunities.

BI Solutions Filter Relevant Information

Different issues require access to different data. BI systems can combine different methods to deliver the best result depending on the task at hand.

In ad hoc analysis with OLAP, corporate data such as stock levels and sales figures is related to previously defined dimensions such as time, branch, etc. This makes it possible, for example, to clearly compare data from different locations.

By means of data mining, data is automatically put into context and correlations are identified.

Thanks to a BI solution, the sales staff of Coca-Cola’s bottling partner Coca-Cola Bottling Company can even access relevant real-time data such as order histories and delivery times while on the road, enabling them to handle customer queries more effectively.

BI Solutions Make Data Visible

Even if the analysed data is tailored to a specific problem, it is usually complex and not very meaningful at first glance. With the help of BI, reports and dashboards are created automatically and present corporate information clearly.

Since decision-makers are interested in different KPIs depending on their position and area of responsibility, these reports can be created and customised individually.

The digital marketing team of the meal kit provider HelloFresh, for example, uses a dashboard created using BI software to keep an eye on the conversions of individual campaigns and optimise them. This not only boosts sales figures, but also reduces the time spent on manual reporting by 10 to 20 working hours a day.