What is Business Intelligence & How Does it Work?

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence or BI refers to the combination of data mining, data analytics and visualization with the best practices to empower organizations to make decisions that are driven by various data inferences. In short, data-driven decision-making is enhanced with the help of Business Intelligence. 

As far as its relevance goes, the modern take on BI will allow an organization to have the right idea of the available data, and then use that data to foster change, take out inefficiencies, and also quickly adapt to the dynamic market scenarios around. 

Modern Business Intelligence software solutions bring about encouragement to provide a full-service analysis, more informed business users, and speedy insight into anything that’s data. 

Over the years, several processes and practices have been added to the BI activity to make it evolve quickly in today’s times where data is almost everything as far as business is concerned. A few of these processes are mentioned below:

- Reporting

It is the activity of sharing business data with stakeholders to help them with their decision-making. 

- Data Mining

Making use of Machine Learning, statistics, and various databases to discover trends in datasets. 

- Data Visualization

Data visualization tools help in transforming data into visual representations like charts, graphs, and the like. 

- Data Preparation

It involves clubbing multiple sources of data, identifying the various stages, and then preparing it all for data analysis.

The Working of Business Intelligence

Every business or organization has a different set of goals. To achieve these goals and also track their performance, it becomes important to gather the right set of data, ensure proper analysis, and then determine the kind of actions that will make the journey of achieving these objectives easier. 

If we talk about the working of a typical BI process, the raw data is first collected from the specific business activity. This gathered data then gets stored in a data warehouse, which is then available for users to be accessed, where the process of analysis starts ahead. 

How Business Intelligence Makes Companies Smarter?

Companies benefit from Business Intelligence by showing the present as well as historic data so that better decisions can be taken and made. This is because BI makes it easier to analyze performance with the competitors so that companies can truly become smarter. 

Mentioned below are a few ways where BI helps companies make smarter decisions:

- New avenues to increase profits.

- Data comparison with the competition. 

- Optimized operations. 

- Customer behavior analysis. 

- Spotting market trends. 

- Performance tracking. 

Final Take

It can be safely said that with the right kind of Business Intelligence software, organizations will find it easy to gather and work on actionable data that’s not just mere data but also offers much more, in terms of value and usability. Epicor’s Grow offers just the perfect combination of BI tools that take your data-driven proficiency to a whole new level.