#1 Increased revenue
Starting off with an obvious one.
Increasing revenue is probably the most important goal for any business.
BI enables you to establish KPIs that align with the business strategy.
This provides visibility into your business performance and ROI.
When you’re using BI effectively, you are far more likely to see your revenue increase with BI reporting.
#2 Reduced costs
BI can help your business find ways to cut costs down.
It can collate data from all areas of the business and note the ones with the highest outgoings.
Find creative ways to reduce spend.
#3 Competitive advantage
Track the sales and marketing performance of your competitors, creating ways to differentiate your products and services.
Handling a large amount of data effectively will also give you a competitive edge.
Utilizing BI tools, you can budget, plan and forecast far more effectively than your competition.
#4 Speed of decision making
As a business, you make key decisions all the time.
Making decisions is heavily reliant on the data you had at the time.
If the data is not accurate or slow to be seen, it can have a detrimental impact on decision making.
By using BI, you can leverage data to ensure key stakeholders receive the information they need, at the right time.
Ultimately, improving time-to-decision.
#5 Operational efficiency
Measuring and monitoring performance is important for all businesses.
BI tools cover key metrics such as:
- Employee satisfaction
- Employee performance
- Employee productivity
This will inevitably encourage better operational behaviour.
#6 Data-driven business decisions
Accurate data + faster reporting = Better business decisions
For example:
Provide your sales team with real-time data and forecasts prior to customer meetings.
They will now be far more confident going into that meeting knowing that the data is up-to-date.
#7 Data quality
Business that collect, update, and create quality data will be more successful.
With BI, you can combine different data sources to create the “big picture”.
#8 Boosts productivity
BI can be a critical tool to ensure competitiveness and productivity.
With BI solutions, you can encourage more intelligent responses to trends in material usage, production, supplier information, staff, and more.
#9 Employee satisfaction
Companies lose an average of more than five working days (43 hours) per employee each year when accounting for data-induced procrastination and sick leave due to stress resulting from information, data and technology issues (Accenture 2020).
BI is designed to be scalable, providing data solutions to:
Departments who need it
Employees who crave data
It should provide a seamless and intuitive user experience for non-technical users to look at data.
#10 Identify market trends
50% of teams and customers are more likely to use Business Intelligence tools after the pandemic compared to before (Sisense 2020).
Businesses can develop a competitive advantage by identifying new opportunities and establishing a strategy based on data.
You can leverage external market data with internal data to detect new sales trends by:
- Analysing customer data
- Analysing market conditions
- Raising existing and potential business issues
#11 Increased margins
You can use BI tools to analyse inefficiencies and help expand margins for your business.
For example:
Use BI to find bottlenecks in your sales team processes.
Once found, you can develop better strategies to be more cost effective.
Alternatively, you could distribute budgets into the more efficient processes.
BI helps you find these issues, so you can react quickly.
#12 Market leadership
BI reporting speeds up processes and unlocks insights you can turn into actions.
With these insights, you can adopt new technologies before everyone else
Making you a market leader.
#13 Customer behaviour insights
BI tools are key to identifying behaviour patterns from your customers.
BI is great for marketing.
You can optimise your marketing campaigns based on previous customer purchases and responses.
#14 Identify new opportunities
By analysing strategies and marketing campaigns with BI, you can create significant insights and reports to identify sources of high ROI.
Revenue growth is vital to any business.
#15 Foster a data culture
Utilise BI software to manage the data for your business.
Data loss and manipulation is very common for businesses.
It’s important to keep data centralised and under control.
With BI, you can ensure that the right people have access to the right data.
