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Data collection is crucial for large enterprises. Due to it, they can collect their business data, analyze whether they fit the market trends for the company’s niche, and enhance their activity effectiveness. Business Intelligence (BI) is the thing helpful in working with data collection and processing.
This post will cover the basics about business intelligence, the stages of its implementation, BI use benefits, and so on.
What is Business Intelligence: Fundamentals You Should Know
Prior to talking more about BI integration, let’s find out the fundamentals as to business intelligence. This umbrella notion implies a bunch of tools (like data gathering, predictive analytics, or text mining) and solutions helpful in acquiring general business data and the subsequent analysis to capitalize on it. Moreover, the customers have the opportunity to create analytics visualizations and create dashboard customizations due to self-service BI environments.
How does business intelligence work? The below image answers this question showing the scheme of the implemented BI operation.
Because of the advancement of self-service BI and data-gathering tools, business analysts and corporate owners are increasingly implementing business intelligence. It’s valuable for them to increase sales and profit, produce accurate projections, and take many other measures for business expansion, and BI can significantly help in all these activities.
BI employs a variety of analytics techniques, such as:
- Data collection
- Text analytics
- Business analytics, etc.
Let’s find out more about the reasons encouraging businesses to use business intelligence.
Reasons to Apply to Business Intelligence
Business intelligence systems are real treasure troves for entrepreneurs. Let’s take a look at its capabilities that attract businesses and make them invest in BI integration:
- Finding income-boosting strategies
- Making rivals comparison
- Conducting market predictions
- Discovering niche trends
- Analyzing users’ behavior
- Monitoring performance
- Detecting shortcomings
- Enhancing business processes
All that will be useful if your company experiences any of the following circumstances:
- Your resources are wasted
- Insufficiently productive personnel
- Your customers are unsatisfied with the service quality
- Your customers leave the company
- The vast amount of data with no further use
- Items under/overstocking
Benefits of Business Intelligence for Companies
BI is the only practical approach to raising an organization’s performance. It’s crucial for businesses of all sizes since it effectively aids in decision-making about business matters based on the supplied analytics and data.
Let’s talk about the other advantages in more details:
Accurate reporting:
The business owner will be immediately reported about any changes in the firm’s development or other points because of the perfect BI reporting. Such reports will contain data visualization and textual material preparation, which will help entrepreneurs analyze their business situation and quickly find out how to enhance it.
Risk control:
BI is a way to lower the risks of hacker penetration or data breaches, safeguard data which is quite sensitive, and stop activity of frauds. So, finance companies use BI to create safe intelligence platforms and reduce fraud and cyberattacks.
Effective decision-making:
The perception of data is made simpler by visualization. It influences a more profound understanding of your company’s advantages, disadvantages and trends. As a consequence, you’ll be the first to use this privilege and be informed of contemporary trends.
Effective time management:
Thanks to the visualization of your company data, you will be able to understand the time you’ll require for one or another workflow, as well as where to boost productivity.
Data accessibility:
The BI tool can swiftly gather readily available data from the storages. Next, you will be able to perform the data analysis, examine the results, and make proper visualizations.
Effective budget management:
BI may seem to be pretty expensive thanks to the variety of advantages it offers. However, you can be confident that BI’s investment costs will soon be repaid. As a result, BI will improve your revenue.
How to Integrate BI into Your Business
The BI benefits will be appropriately used if you implement business intelligence into your everyday processes. Now we’ll tell you how to perform it step-by-step.
Make necessary preparations:
To successfully implement BI in your business flow, you should perform a bunch of work like: defining the goals the BI-empowered business system should gain, specifying KPIs, identifying where to find app developers for your future BI-based solution, and many more. Remember you can hire an in-house team or simplify your job and apply to outsourcing software professionals.
Decide on the BI-based software type:
After deciding which BI solution is ideal for you and generating features lists and proper specifications for your project, you should investigate the BI market and consider the existing options you may use for inspiration while creating your own BI software.
BI implementation itself:
You should thoroughly work on data preparation, analysis, and processing. This procedure includes upgrading or deleting the odd or unimportant data. Then, make all the necessary modifications (e.g., launching all the essential software components before you continue to develop your app). Finally, you need to train your personnel that will operate with your innovative BI-based solution.
Profit from BI use:
You may continue to use the BI solution by working with data, and using the output to enhance company strategy, optimize business processes, and distribute your resources and investments wisely.
BI Architecture: What to Pay Attention To
Let’s talk about BI architecture integration in greater detail as it too has a lot of intricacies.
The BI architecture should adhere to the following criteria:
- Detalization. The data is extracted as precisely as possible and shows the same level of precision as the data from the resources.
- Maintainability. Estimates, the system and its reasoning behind KPIs should all be recorded in one place.
- Synchronization. The frequency of occurrences in the relevant business processes should be taken into account when determining the data refresh rate in the data warehouse and statistics.
- Symmetry. The architectural design corresponds with business procedures. The statistic will therefore be significant for internal company needs.
What things you should think about when creating BI software architecture?
Information storage choice:
If you don’t have the infrastructure, choosing the data storage is the first thing to do. Next, while performing the integration of the BI solution, choose the appropriate alternative: On-Premise, Cloud, or Hybrid environment.
Think about availability:
Planning accessibility along with the company is a good idea. Make sure the relationship between resources and availability is balanced. And care about your BI architecture security.
Create the data architecture for your BI:
Before developing BI features (e.g., reports, dashboards, and self-service datasets), BI architecture must be built.
BI Implementation Cost
There is a number of factors that influences how much a BI adoption project will cost. The most typical ones are listed below:
- The amount of data tables and columns analyzed
- Quantity of machine learning algorithms used
- The number of data resources (ERP, CRM, HRM, EHR, etc.).
- Reports’ amount and complexity
- Complexity of the user permissions system
- Using Big Data Analytics (yes/no)
- The number of dashboards, etc.
The size of the company’s structure also has an influence on BI software development costs. Therefore let’s look at how the price changes based on the number of company employees:
$80,000 – $200,000 – for companies containing 200 – 500 employees
$200,000 – $400,000 – organizations with 500 – 1,000 employees
$400,000 – $1,000,000 – companies including 1,000+ employees
Summing Up
In order to properly implement business intelligence into your company’s everyday processes, you can contact a skilled software development company. The IT specialists will help you decide how to develop BI-empowered software which will be profitable, user-friendly and effective for your business.