Why Do I Need a Business Intelligence Solution?
With the amount of data stored by companies growing exponentially, business intelligence (BI) grows ever more important as organizations need to translate that data to meaningful insights that will support future growth and strategies.
As BI technology has advanced, deployment, licensing, and support options have made it more accessible for organizations of all sizes. Virtually every business can benefit from BI. Specific issues or scenarios that are good indicators a BI discussion should take place include:
- The need to integrate data from multiple business applications or data sources
- Lack of visibility into the company’s operations, finances, and other areas
- The need to access relevant business data quickly and efficiently
- Increasing volume of users requiring and accessing information and more end-users requiring analytical capabilities
- Rapid company growth or a recent or pending merger/acquisition
- Introduction of new products
- Upgrades within the IT environment
There are several benefits a BI solution offers to an organization regardless of size:
Share information efficiently and effectively across your organization
BI makes it easy for everyone – from decision-makers to functional teams – to access and analyze up-to-date information anytime, anywhere. Everyone throughout the company can make better decisions, faster.
Empower your people
Providing employees with access to analytical data that is readily available and understandable allows them to work more effectively and support the overall business strategy.
Simplify collaboration and improve alignment with a single source for accurate financial and operational information
Having a single, central location allows you to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs), access reports, analyze your data, and share documents. Functional areas can align to articulate strategies, set objectives, and monitor the organization’s performance so you can make better informed and timely strategic decisions.
Deliver meaningful analysis and reporting
Readily track and analyze KPIs against key business goals to gain a better understanding of how your business is performing today and not when it’s too late to impact performance.
Have a solution with the scalability and flexibility to grow and change as your organization does
Most companies still have their valuable data stored in services or massive Excel spreadsheets. While Excel has many useful features it doesn’t scale to your business, but it doesn’t scale to your business and compiling data from multiple, disparate databases is time-consuming and is prone to errors.
With Microsoft’s Power BI – a cloud-based, self-service business intelligence solution – you have a tool that can scale and grow with your business. It allows you to consolidate and analyze data from different sources, combining them into reports and dashboards to illuminate what’s happening in your business.
If you’re familiar with Excel, then the BI learning curve is a snap. Contact us to learn more about Power BI and how it can unlock silos in your business and bring your data together to deliver meaningful insights and drive impactful business decisions.