Niche or industry aside, to make continual progress in a cutthroat commercial landscape, it's no longer good enough to simply tick along in the digital age, innovation and evolution must be a core part of your business strategy.
To continually improve and innovate, embracing the power of business intelligence (BI) is the way forward. BI software and practices will ensure you're able to squeeze every last drop of value from your company's most relevant data, driving growth, efficiency, and creativity in the process.
Through business intelligence, you can propel your business to new heights at warp speed while beating the competition to the punch across every conceivable channel or touchpoint. BI performance management will get you where you need (and beyond) and here we're going to show you how.
Business intelligence is centered around the strategies and software that forward-thinking companies use for robust data analysis across every key function, process, and department.
BI solutions offer historical, real-time, and predictive data visualizations that ultimately improve 'in the moment' decision-making, strategic planning, and internal collaboration.
Business intelligence helps users to dig deeper into relevant data while connecting with trends, patterns, or correlations they would have otherwise missed.
BI performance management not only drives organizational growth and helps to streamline operations (from sales & marketing to fulfillment, supply chain management, and beyond), but it also saves time, which empowers internal talent to focus on more creative areas of the business.
To put the power of BI into business-boosting perspective, here are a few insights you should know:
"Data really powers everything that we do." - Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn
There's no denying that BI performance management will propel the success of your business. Now, to show what BI in business does for organizations across sectors, here are seven inspiring examples of BI based on real-world scenarios.
One of the key areas that many modern organizations lack in concerning quality and output is customer support and experience.
Considering that customer experience (CX) is now one of the main brand differentiators across industries, remaining productive and responsive while offering a quality service across multiple touchpoints is vital.
Upon realizing that their customer service output was dwindling and their brand reputation had taken a hit, a German-based digital travel agency invested in BI software in a bid to improve their data analytics strategy.
In addition to getting to the heart of the issue and making critical support-boosting improvements, the company was also able to automate specific parts of its data analysis processes while giving everyone in the organization relevant visual insights from one central dashboard. As a result, the travel agency's net promoter score (NPS) ratings and customer loyalty rates improved dramatically in a matter of months.
One of the key goals for most businesses (both SaaS and tangible goods-based organizations) is finding a way to improve sales continually.
Identifying an inconsistent sales performance and strategy, a scaling online retailer ramped up its BI efforts to solve the issue. Rolling out BI performance management initiatives across its sales and marketing department helped senior decision-makers to set key performance indicators (KPIs) that better aligned with the business's key objectives while empowering its sales reps with access to data that improved real-time decision-making.
Without a data-driven financial strategy, your business will inevitably waste money on a regular basis. When that happens, your progress will become stunted, and your prospects will become limited.
Concerned that its cash flow situation was going to come to a grinding halt, a health diagnostics brand turned to BI software to pinpoint the specific reasons for its fiscal issues.
To prevent fiscal devastation, the company turned to a BI solution that consolidated its fragmented financial data while bringing a wealth of critical financial metrics to life. Shortly after customizing its BI dashboard, the company's financial executives were able to spot glaring inefficiencies within key fiscal processes and nip them in the bud before they landed the business in hot water.
Given the fact that retaining existing consumers costs less than sourcing new ones, focusing on customer loyalty initiatives is essential if you want to achieve consistent commercial growth.
As a crowded sector, eCommerce and retail businesses need to cement customer loyalty to maintain their brand reputation while earning a steady flow of sales or subscriptions. This brings us to our next example of BI in business.
A budding online clothing store had hit the wall in terms of audience growth as well as profitability and needed to take swift action to prevent commercial stagnation. To improve its BI performance management strategy, the business implemented visual dashboard software to drill down deep into the behavioral and demographicts of its audience across channels.
In doing so, the retailer was able to segment its customers effectively to deliver highly-personalized content at the times they were most likely to engage. As a result, the company's customer loyalty rates skyrocketed, boosting online sales while inspiring further brand growth through social media-based consumer advocacy.
This sales & marketing-based dashboard software example shows how BI solutions can visualize key engagement or trends data to uncover powerful strategic insights.
Despite its vital importance, many SMBs don't have an effective system in place when it comes to managing their growing inventories.
To scale successfully, ensuring your inventory management strategy is streamlined, fluent, and implemented using reliable data-driven insights is essential. Without an effective BI-centric strategy in place, you will waste time and money with consistently poor decisions.
A niche electronics supplier experienced major inventory management problems after securing a series of new supplier contracts. Scaling swiftly, the company's outdated manual stock and inventory processing operations started to crack, draining the business's inventory budget while harming its brand reputation.
To tackle the problem before it spiraled out of control (and sealed the business's fate), the electronics supplier adopted a smart BI-based decision support system (DDS) to take control of the way it measured, tracked, stored, and dispatched its inventory.
Armed with insightful data visualizations that covered every key aspect of the inventory management process while setting up customized alerts, the supplier not only avoided a potential logistical catastrophe, but it was also able to scale further, eventually moving into a bigger, more amenable warehouse.
Another invaluable way that BI performance management solutions help organizations thrive in the digital age is by uncovering insights that are typically missed using traditional data analytics methods or strategies.
In our final BI in business scenario, the CEO of an ambitious tech startup identified the pressing need to connect with trending patterns that would help her develop campaigns, content, and partnerships that would make the company stand out in a saturated market place.
One of the most glaring roadblocks concerning 'insight discovery' was seriously fragmented data coupled with informational blindspots in some of the startup's core internal departments.
Investing in dynamic BI software, the CEO gave everyone within the business access to a centralized dashboard with KPIs and metrics that empowered them to perform to the best of their abilities. As a result of this significant shift to a data-driven culture, the startup pushed itself ahead of its competitors by streamlining its operations while uncovering fresh commercial insights that help it leverage less explored pockets of the marketplace. A testament to the power of BI in business.
This weather-based dashboard is an example of how BI dashboards can serve up vivid and actionable trend-based information at scale.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Don't store unnecessary data, keep an eye on what's happening, and don't take unnecessary risks."-Chris Bell, former US congressman
The power of BI in business is undeniable and it's only getting stronger. To compete in tomorrow's world, adopting a business intelligence mindset is vital. Embrace the power of data, and you will push yourself ahead of the pack.
We hope these BI in business examples have inspired you to start your journey and for more informational pearls of wisdom, read our exploration of the latest data analytics and business intelligence trends.
7 Real-World Examples of Business Intelligence in Use | Tutorial by Chartio
23 Real-World Examples of Business Intelligence | NetSuite
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