Business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technological processes for collecting, managing and analyzing organizational data to yield insights that inform business strategies and operations.
Business intelligence analysts transform raw data into meaningful insights that drive strategic decision-making within an organization. BI tools enable business users to access different types of data—historical and current, third-party and in-house, as well as semistructured data and unstructured data such as social media. Users can analyze this information to gain insights into how the business is performing and what it should do next.
According to CIO magazine: “Although business intelligence does not tell business users what to do or what will happen if they take a certain course, neither is BI only about generating reports. Rather, BI offers a way for people to examine data to understand trends and derive insights.”1
Organizations can use the insights gained from BI and data analysis to improve business decisions, identify problems or issues, spot market trends and find new revenue or business opportunities.
BI Consulting
Our specialized BI consultants will guide you through the BI implementation and optimization process to create a single source of truth for informed decision-making. We support you with SWOT analysis, business strategy evaluation, forecasting, requirement analysis, and competitive analysis. Our business intelligence consulting services are designed to support you with reviewing existing data management practices, BI implementation road mapping with solution conceptualization, architecture design & technology section, BI solution cloud migration & more. BI strategy roadmap to help visualize analytics & communicate learning analysis
Business Intelligence Implementation
Drive maximum value from your BI investment with our expert business intelligence implementation services. Our BI consultant will work closely with you to understand your unique business goals and challenges. We will help you design, implement, and integrate a custom BI solution that seamlessly aligns with your existing infrastructure and data sources. We provide ongoing support throughout the implementation process to ensure you leverage the full potential of our BI services.
Data Warehousing
As your trusted business intelligence service provider, we offer DWH services specific to your business needs. We help engineer central repositories to Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) data from disparate platforms and applications. Our team leverages automated data aggregation for large transaction volumes using OLAP engines to enable multi-dimensional queries. We specialize in integrating data warehousing solutions with data viz tools to create dashboards and periodic reports.
Reporting & Data Visualization
We develop customizable dashboards with robust reporting and analytics tools to pivot from raw data that run on any browser or platform. Our business intelligence services help you discover critical patterns, trends, and correlations to make data-driven business decisions confidently. Our team focuses on creating interactive & real-time dashboards that are collaborative, self-service-driven & mobile-friendly.
Migration & Modernization
We provide systematic and reliable migration support for your BI initiatives. Our team focuses on creating a strategic data migration roadmap to transfer your data to a new BI environment, which goes beyond a basic ETL. We help you navigate the challenges due to demand changes or technology innovation with services for moving to newer platforms/applications or version upgrades.
BI Integration
Our business intelligence integration services cover the development, design & deployment of scalable & robust solutions. We help integrate, process, and analyze historical and real-time data. Our specialists can help you integrate performance tracking, automated reporting, and KPIs monitoring. We offer a unique blend of domain experience and in-depth industry knowledge to provide custom BI services aligned with your business needs and then iterate as your BI needs grow. Data integration helps combine data from different sources into a single & unified view
Business intelligence versus business analytics
Business intelligence (BI) explains and makes better business decisions based on current business information. Business Intelligence (BI) is a part of BI that provides prescriptions focused on the future. It is the umbrella of the BI infrastructure, including tools for analyzing and storing decision-making information.
BI can tell an organization how many new customers it acquired last month and whether its order size increased or decreased that month. Conversely, business analysts can use this profile to predict which strategies will be most beneficial to the organization. For example: What if we increased our advertising to offer a special deal to new customers?
How BI works
BI platforms have traditionally relied on data warehouses to capture key insights. The advantage of data warehousing is that it integrates data from multiple sources into a centralized system to support business data analysis and reporting. BI presents results to users in the form of reports, charts, and maps that can be viewed via dashboards. For example: “What are the sales in the East and West this year compared to last year?”
OLAP provides powerful tools for data discovery, simplifying BI, complex metrics, and analysis. One of the key benefits of OLAP is the consistency of its operations, which can improve product quality, customer relationships, and business processes. The advantage of Data Lake House is that it is dedicated to solving the main problems of data storage and data lakes by providing organizations with the best data management solutions. Lakehouse represents the next generation of data management solutions.
The steps taken in BI usually flow in this order:
- Data sources: Identify the data to be reviewed and analyzed, such as from a data warehouse or data lake, cloud, Hadoop, industry statistics, supply chain, CRM, inventory, pricing, sales, marketing or social media.
- Data collection: Gather and clean data from various sources. This data preparation might be manually gathering information in a spreadsheet or an automatic extract, transform and load (ETL) program.
- Analysis: Look for trends or unexpected results in the data. This might use data mining, data discovery or data modeling tools.
- Visualization: Create data visualizations, graphs and dashboards that use business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Cognos Analytics, Microsoft Excel or SAP. Ideally this visualization includes drill-down, drill-through, drill-up features to enable users to investigate various data levels.
- Action plan: Develop actionable insights based on analysis of historical data versus key performance indicators (KPIs). Actions might include more efficient processes, changes in marketing, fixing supply chain issues or adapting customer experience issues.
Benefits of business intelligence
Great BI helps businesses and organizations ask and answer questions of their data.
So now you know what BI is, and how it works. But how does BI actually help businesses?
BI is more than just software—it’s a way to keep a holistic and real-time view of all your relevant business data. Implementing BI offers a myriad of benefits, from better analysis to an increase in competitive advantage. Some of the top business intelligence benefits include:
- Data clarity
- Increased efficiency
- Better customer experience
- Improved employee satisfaction