It is certainly easier to answer the 'who' rather than the 'what' part of the question posed above. EVERY business, irrespective of their size needs business intelligence to some degree if they are to survive. If you are a small retail outlet and you don't know what products are your best sellers or cannot accurately predict what lines product will be the most profitable in the future, you are unlikely to stay in business long. In fact, even knowing what products sell well is still be far too simplistic a view. Your best selling products or services may be the ones you make the least margin on and under scrutiny it may be that your business benefits more from some of the lower volume sales. This all sounds pretty obvious but many businesses cannot reliably get at such information.
In order to gain this insight, a business needs; as a minimum, to be able to analyse it's operational data in a number of ways and determine the correlating factors that influence it's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Ideally it should not only be able to determine what's been good and bad for business historically and topically, but should be able to forecast what will most likely result in the company meeting it's short and long term targets. This is where Business Intelligence (BI) comes in.
Business Intelligence is the capability to analyse topical and historical company information to gain insight into factors that do, or may affect the companies performance. This capability supports a much more informed decision making process, allowing companies to set qualified performance targets, measure their performance more accurately and understand and predict those factors that may influence company growth and customer behaviour.
Any worthwhile BI solution should pay for itself many times over in customer growth and retention, turnover or profitability and should ensure that a business can accurately forecast future trends and be prepared to exploit them.
Initially, most companies employ BI to help understand the now rather than the future in the form of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting. KPI is typically the initial benefit of a BI solution, but this capability is merely the tip of the BI iceberg. Successful BI systems offer so much more than a measurement of performance against targets.
A good BI system supports a range of analytical activity including:
- KPI Dashborads & reports
- Market analysis.
- 'What if?' modeling.
- Customer segmentation and behavioural profiling.
- Customer lifecycle modeling.
- Fraudulent activity monitoring.
- Fiscal audit capabilities.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration.
- Targeted Marketing campaigns.
- Data quality management.
- Strategic decision making using all of the above.
The key to BI is to address the data rich, information poor imbalance often found in many organisations by removing the dependency upon operational systems to provide the BI information. For more informationregarding the compments of a good BI solution, please register and read our FREE article: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
All companies need BI to some extent irrespective of their size. It's easy for us to see why multinational conglomerates might need to consolidate sale information from various countries in order to control growth, but even the small or medium enterprise will benefit from having BI capabilities.
Understanding who your best customers are, their spending habits and how you can encourage them to do more business with you are activities that are at the heart of all sustainable business growth irrespective of how large your company is. If you hold any customer and sales information electronically you can implement a BI system that will pay for itself in next to no time. It is all a question of scale. BI does not have to be expensive nor complicated, but even a small investment will produce dramatic results and can help strengthen the relationships that a business has with its customers. If you can predict what our customers may want next, then you are much better placed to offer the product or services that they require.
BI is like a Beacon, it lets a company know where it is and where it should be going. It is no coincidence that our company is named Beacon. It is the navigational insight provided by a successful BI system that we wish to help you attain. If you wish to learn more of your capabilities for free contact us and let Beacon guide you.
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