The previous post < Isn’t Business … > described what Business Intelligence is and is not. This posting will explore the most common applications of Business Intelligence (BI) systems.
Business Intelligence systems benefit organizations by helping put accurate and timely information at the fingertips of decision makers. Undoubtedly some of the most important corporate decisions relates to customers, sales and financials. It should come as no surprise that most common applications of Business Intelligence are related to these subjects. These common applications are:
- Sales Analytics
- Operational Analytics
- Financial Reporting & Analytics
- Compliance Analytics
- Risk Analytics
- Pricing Analytics
- Operations Analytics
- Spatial Analytics
- Website Analytics
- Product Management Analytics
- Inventory Management Analytics
Today the most widely used Business Intelligence application by small and medium sized companies (SMB) are Sales Analytics and Customer Analytics and Financial Reporting. These three applications alone can dramatically help companies by help identify new sales opportunities, increase customer satisfaction and reduce the revenue cycle. Imagine seamlessly identifying cross sell opportunities, Anticipating customer order issues in advance and quickly invoicing the completed jobs.
Identifying the non-performing products/business partners could also be vital to the company’s success. Eliminating non-performing products/business partners could positively impact the overall profitability by reducing allocated resources to manage the product/relationship and hence improve the financial standing of the organization.
For example, if your organization makes money from successful sales by business affiliates to leads generated by you, then you need to maintain a high closing rate to attract the right kind of business partners. Identifying and eliminating non-performing business affiliates is one way to achieve higher closing rate.
Also keeping tap on operation, helps anticipating issues and be prepared to proactively and properly addressing them, in order to increase the likelihood of on-time delivery.
So anytime you need to crunch large volume of numbers, prepare reports from data spread into multiple internal/external systems, seamlessly share information with peers, managers, customers and regulators or setup proactive alerts based on critical business events, remember that Business Intelligence systems can make your life much much easier.
If you are not taking advantage of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence benefits, this is a great time to contact your trusted technology partner to find out how your business could benefit from these new power tools.
Specializing in predictive analysis, AnalyticsPoint constructs executive dashboard software and other business intelligence tools to gather and organize business objects so that executives can maximize benefits from performance management software. Tools such as a data warehouse and balanced scorecard are used to enhance enterprise business intelligence so that companies can understand and react to circumstances and opportunity with lightning speed and precision.
Tooraj Kazeminy
CHIEF KNOWLEDGE OFFICER
AnalyticsPoint
