The Role of Business Intelligence In Small to Mid-Sized Companies
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) uses software tools that convert data into valuable insights, which enable businesses to make tactical decisions. These tools access and analyze large data sets and then present them into easy to read formats such as charts, graphs, maps, summary reports and such. At its core, business intelligence leverages data to make life easy for businesses today!
While business intelligence is known to be used by Fortune 500 companies, it would be a misconception to assume that it is only used by large corporations. Today, even small and medium sized businesses are realizing that they stand to gain much from the fruits of business intelligence software.
Besides being cost effective, these BI tools also provide data insights that enable such businesses to come up with better strategies in order to catch up to the competition. So, read ahead to know about 4 ways business intelligence can play an important role in the growth of small to medium sized businesses.
1. Fast & Accurate Decision Making
Using business intelligence tools allows companies to have access to real-time information. It allows them to examine the latest facts and then make crucial decisions based on this data, instead of merely relying on their instincts or previous year's reports. Now, small businesses can view trends as they are happening and act on them on time!
2. Improves Communication
The biggest advantage of using business intelligence software is that it allows for easy data sharing and collaboration within a company. Thus, businesses can take advantage of this feature so that different departments can get access to the same data for effective collaboration and decision making. These data insights can incredibly be useful even if you have a one-man team for HR, Accounting, or marketing instead of entire departments.
3. Gives Competitor Insights
Gone are those days when small businesses needed to rack their brains to understand what makes their competitors tick! With the advent of digital innovation, every business creates a huge amount of data and leaves a digital trail behind. A strong business intelligence software allows you to follow this trail and access your competitor’s data. From sales patterns to social media trends and even public financial records - there is much you can gain from your competitor with such data insights.
4. Helps in customer profiling
To succeed in boosting sales, a company needs to carefully understand customer behaviour and their buying patterns. This is even more important for small to medium sized businesses, as they have an imperative need to keep growing the business.
However, monitoring changes in real time and customer profiling requires mining tons of data. Moreover, these data insights are located in different locations, which makes it difficult to integrate it and summarize in-depth reports. This is why business intelligence software are used to better collate data and make the profiling process easier for businesses today.
At IDC Technologies, we specialize in providing you with highly effective business intelligence software. These tools and technologies will enable you to get access to better data and concise reports, which will enable you to grow your business to new heights!
