The amount of data being generated these days is staggering. The data can tell you what happened, but the real advantage comes from knowing why something happened, what’s likely to happen next, and figuring out the levers that swing the odds in your favor. Organizations that can make sense of this data using business intelligence tools have a significant competitive advantage.
While organizations are always looking for ways to improve, a relentless focus on business excellence requires a data-driven approach to monitor, measure, and model performance. Yet, few companies have realized the full benefits of business intelligence. Less than 20% of executives say they have firmly established a consistent data culture within their company and just a third say they can create measurable value from enterprise data.
BI Tools Produce Competitive Advantages
By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time, organizations can gain a deep understanding of customer behavior, improve reaction time, improve forecast accuracy, and create a data-driven culture. Each of these provides pathways to business excellence and helps identify areas for continuous improvement.
- Understanding Customer Behavior: BI software helps you better understand, predict, and influence customer behavior. With deep insight into how customers think, act, and spend, you can better target your approach. This can fuel marketing and sales efforts to optimize customer acquisition and retention.
- Recognizing Emerging Trends : In business, speed is often a determining factor in success. First-mover advantage can create new markets and opportunities that followers miss. When you can recognize emerging trends more quickly, you can make better decisions about how they impact your business.
IDC predicts those with an enterprise intelligence strategy will have 5X better reaction time — allowing them to recognize and capitalize on emerging trends and opportunities. - Improving Forecast Accuracy: The right BI tools can also help improve forecast accuracy, providing the hard data businesses need to inform decisions. Analyzing and benchmarking past results can provide a baseline for real-time comparison. Besides routine reporting, automated alerts can trigger when forecasts deviate from expected results, allowing you to make mid-course corrections faster.
Better forecasting provides significant benefits, including improved inventory management, cash flow planning, supply chain efficiencies, and increased agility. - Streamlining Operations and Improve Efficiency: A solid BI strategy can identify bottlenecks to optimize efficiency. You get a holistic view of the entire workflow and can model how changes will produce different outcomes. This lets you see the impact of your decisions before you put them into action.
One big advantage of business intelligence is that it’s not a one-and-done scenario. It is a continuous journey for improvement. By setting benchmarks and tracking progress, you can create a consistent focus on improvement, creating incremental gains in efficiency and productivity over time. - Creating a Data-Driven Culture: BI tools empower decision-makers throughout an organization. By making data available, leaders can make decisions more confidently knowing that they can measure results. This encourages teams to be more proactive rather than reactive. Leading organizations ensure metrics are aligned with goals and then tie every decision back to the data.
Realizing Your Competitive Advantage with BI Tools
Bringing all of these elements together requires robust and adaptable BI tools to realize this competitive advantage. The best BI tools will enable you to:
- Integrate Tiered Data Sources: BI tools can connect to and combine data from multiple systems like databases, cloud data warehouses, spreadsheets, and more to provide a comprehensive viewpoint. This consolidated data serves as the foundation for analysis and reporting.
Example: Integrating sales data from the CRM system with market size projections from an analyst’s model enables better demand forecasting by incorporating both internal transaction history and external market dynamics. - Surface Underlying Connections: Using statistical, AI, and machine learning, BI tools can analyze datasets to identify trends, patterns clustering, correlations, seasonality, and other non-obvious relationships among data elements. These connections power predictive capabilities.
Example: Cluster analysis of customer data uncovers common purchasing behaviors between consumer segments that were previously viewed as distinct, enabling personalized promotions that increase cross-selling. - Produce Real-Time, Interactive Visualizations: BI transforms raw datasets into intuitive interactive dashboards, charts, graphs, and geospatial maps to convey insights. Compelling visuals make data patterns clear and easy to absorb for faster interpretation and decision-making.
Example: An executive dashboard with graphs tracking weekly sales, customer satisfaction score trends, and market share provides an at-a-glance overview of company performance. - Model and Compare Scenarios: BI enables building models to test assumptions and compare versioned analyses side-by-side to predict the impact of different decisions on KPIs. This empowers leaders to preview outcomes before acting.
Example: Contrasting sales projections under high vs. low economic growth scenarios allows executives to evaluate ROI. This can be especially important in times of economic uncertainty. - Navigate Hierarchies Easily: BI facilitates drilling down into greater detail and up to higher summarizations, plus linking KPIs across categories. This connects insights across functional areas for a complete picture.
Example: Drilling from revenue by product category down to SKU-level sales data enables supply chain teams to identify strong-performing products to prioritize.
Business Excellence in Today's Business Landscape
Nearly three-quarters of businesses consider digital transformation as their top priority. Leveraging the data and encompassing rapidly evolving artificial intelligence and machine learning have become essential tools for optimizing and growing businesses.
Wyn Enterprise is a business intelligence tool that empowers users with self-service BI to uncover important insights to make better decisions on their journey to business excellence. By embedding BI tools within your organization and the software you already use, you can create a data-driven culture to power your business.
Unlike many other BI tools, Wyn Enterprise can be embedded in an unlimited number of applications with no limits on end users. In other words, there is one flat fee regardless of the number of users or amount of data being processed. This allows you to scale no matter how many employees you have or how much data you use, providing consistent, predictable budgeting with unlimited growth potential.
Dan Columbus
Dan is the Director of Enterprise Sales focusing on BI and data-analytics products. Dan holds a BS in engineering from Penn State and has used it for a career in technical selling and management. He is always seeking the “win-win” deal and enjoys working with clients to help them achieve their goals.
When he isn't working with data clients, he spends time with his family and enjoys traveling to new places with them. Dan also enjoys art, architecture, and loves to compete in poker tournaments.
You can connect with Dan on LinkedIn.
