Business intelligence (BI) provides data that helps companies make timely and informeddecisions. We explain how implementing BI software can give companies of any size acompetitive edge. Plus, we share examples of how some of the most tech savvy companies areusing BI.
What Is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business intelligence refers to the technology that enables businesses to organize, analyzeand contextualize business data from around the company. BI includes multiple tools andtechniques to transform raw data into meaningful and actionable information.
BI systems have four main parts:
- A data warehouse stores company information from a variety of sources in a centralizedand accessible location.
- Business analytics or data management tools mine and analyze data in the data warehouse.
- Business performance management (BPM)tools monitor and analyze progress towards business goals.
- A user interface (usually an interactive dashboard with data visualization reportingtools) provides quick access the information.
German market research firm Statista estimates the volume of data created worldwide by 2024will be 149 zettabytes. This vast amount of data, or "big data," has made businessintelligence systems relevant for companies that want to harness itspower for a competitive advantage. Many BI systems use artificial intelligence (AI)and other capabilities as a part of business analytics.
Key Takeaways:
- Business intelligence offers a wide variety of tools and techniques to support reliableand accurate decision-making.
- The most successful companies use BI to make sense of ever-increasing amounts of data ina fast and economical way.
- BI-based, data-driven decision-making helps companies stay relevant and competitive.
Where Is BI Used?
Sales, marketing, finance and operations departments use business intelligence. Tasks includequantitative analysis, measuring performance against business goals, gleaning customerinsights and sharing data to identify new opportunities.
Here are examples of how various teams and departments use business intelligence.
Data scientists and analysts:
Analysts are BI power users, and they use centralized company data paired withpowerful analytics tools to understand where opportunities for improvement exist andwhat strategic recommendations to propose to company leadership.
Finance:
By blending financial data with operations, marketing and sales data, users can pullinsights from which decisions can be acted upon and understand factors that impactprofit and loss.
Marketing:
Business intelligence tools help marketers track campaign metrics from a centraldigital space. BI systems can provide real-time campaign tracking, measure eacheffort’s performance and plan for future campaigns. This data gives marketingteamsmore visibility into overall performance and provides contextual visuals for sharingwith the company.
Sales:
Sales data analysts and operation managers often use BI dashboards and keyperformance indicators (KPIs) for quick access to complex information like discountanalysis, customer profitability and customer lifetime value. Sales managers monitorrevenue targets, sales rep performance along with the status of the sales pipelineusing dashboards with reports and data visualizations.
Operations:
To save time and resources, managers can access and analyze data like supply chain metrics to find ways tooptimize processes. Business intelligence can also ensure that service levelagreements are met and help improve distribution routes.
In a genuinely data-driven company, every department and employee can take advantage ofBI-generated insights.
What Is the Value of Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence's highest value is its ability to support data-driven decisions. BItransforms pools of raw data into useful information that informs decisions and leads toactions that yield positive bottom-line impact.
BI systems drive decisions based on historical, current and potential future data.
Descriptive analytics:
These analytics reveal what has happened or is happening and are part of dashboards,business reporting, data warehousing and scorecards. When managed well, you’llhavea better understanding of problem areas in your business and can find opportunitiesto improve.
Predictive analytics:
These advanced analytics use data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learningto help make projections of future events and assess the likelihood that somethingwill happen.
Prescriptive analytics:
These analytics reveal why you should take a particular action. Prescriptiveanalytics enable optimization, simulation, decision modeling and provide the bestpossible analysis for business decisions and actions.
BI software gathers sales, production, financial and many other business data sources. Manycompanies use industry data to benchmark performance against competitors.
The Benefits of Business Intelligence
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Visualization | Advanced interactive dashboard representations of data using simple userinterfaces offer the ability to visualize information in a graphicalformat to understand data more insightfully. |
| Connection | The ability to manage and meld access to various data sources provides a360-degree view of your business and your company that is not possiblein a siloed data environment. |
| Collaboration | Tools enable data-informed improvements in various business functionslike marketing, finance, sales, operations, finance, support, HR andcustomer care individually and together. |
| Multi-Platform, Multi-User | BI applications work online and in mobile environments. Tools improvesystem performance so enterprises can distribute more information totargeted users faster. In multi-terabyte data warehouses, these toolsprovide excellent query performance. |
| Scalability | Many systems offer user scalability to support advanced reporting andanalysis. Dashboards and reports are available to many users, not justrestricted to the organization's data analysts or executives. |
| Speed and Competitive Edge | BI can perform faster reporting, analysis and planning because of accessto global data. The system's analysis capabilities make it possible toreact to market or other conditions quickly. |
| Trusted Data and Accuracy | Reports can be highly customized, and KPIs monitored using more than onedata source. Real-time generated reports offer relevant data, whichhelps organizations, and their employees make better decisions. Thesereports provide insights, access, accuracy, and relevance. |
| Analysis and Insights | BI processes vast amounts of data to forecast, budget, plan, and staycurrent. Competitive analysis helps companies understand the competitionand benchmark competitor performance. This business intelligence enablesproduct and service differentiation. |
| Decision-Making Support | Companies gain a competitive edge when they can leverage the existingdata at the right time to make accurate decisions faster. |
| Efficiency and Productivity | A 360-degree view of all activities helps companies identify issues,improve operations, increase sales, and in turn, increase revenue. |
| Customer Satisfaction | BI can help you identify what services or products you're lacking andimprove customer satisfaction by making necessary changes. Reports helpyou understand customer behavior, develop user personas, and usereal-time data on the customer's feedback to make corrective changes andimprove customer service and, therefore, satisfaction. |
| Employee Satisfaction | Using BI data, you can assess team members' strengths and weaknesses andassign relevant training modules to support success. BI tools canautomatically recognize positive behavior while regularly trackingworker contributions and improvement. |
| Savings | BI insight into the corporation's raw data will help decision-makersanalyze cost-saving opportunities like excess inventory, human resourceredundancies, marketing overages, too many vendors or waste infacilities management. |
| Savings and Profitability | BI tools can analyze any discrepancies, inefficiencies, or errors. BIhelps to increase profit margins by providing insights that lead tofuture sales and guide where to spend future budgets. |
| Strategic and KPI Targeting | BI assists companies in gaining a competitive edge by helping them findnew opportunities and build smarter strategies. Use the data to identifymarket trends and help improve profit margins for the company. Reportsbased on tracking established KPIs ensure the enterprise stays on courseto match or exceed goals. |
Business intelligence has many benefits and can be a useful tool to achieve positive outcomesfor your business.
Case Studies: Real-World Examples of Business Intelligence at Work
Fast, data-informed decision-making can drive success. High customer expectations, globalcompetition and narrow profit margins mean many organizations, regardless of size or sector,look to BI for a competitive advantage.
What is an example of business intelligence? Using data to serve up personalized ads based onbrowsing history, providing contextual KPI data access for all employees and centralizingdata from across the business into one digital ecosystem so processes can be more thoroughlyreviewed are all examples of business intelligence. Here are some case studies that showsome ways BI is making a difference for companies around the world:
Lotte.com: BI Increases Company Revenue
Lotte.com is the leading internet shopping mall in Korea with 13 million customers.
- Challenge: With more than 1 million site visitors daily,company executives wanted to understand why customers abandon shopping carts.
- Solution: The assistant general manager of the marketingplanning team implemented customer experience analytics, the first onlinebehavioral analysis system applied in Korea. The manager used the information tounderstand customer behavior and implement targeted marketing and transform thewebsite.
- Results: With the insights from the new BI analytics program,there was an increase in customer loyalty after one year and an increase of $10million in sales. The changes came from identifying the causes of shopping cartabandonment, such as a long checkout process and unexpected delivery times andremedying the situation.
Cementos Argos: BI Improves Financial Efficiency
Cementos Argos is a cement company with operations in the U.S., Central and SouthAmerica and the Caribbean.
- Challenge: The company looked for an overall competitiveadvantage and a way to support better decision-making.
- Solution: Cementos Argos created a dedicated business analyticscenter. The company invested in experienced business analysts and data scienceteams and used BI to leverage data.
- Results: The company standardized the finance process andapplied big data to gain more in-depth insight into customer behavior whichyielded a higher profitability level.
Baylis & Harding: BI Provides Decision Making Process Support
Baylis & Harding is a wholesale distributor specializing in world-classtoiletries and gift sets found in major and independent resellers.
- Challenge: The company needed to give managers and executivesgreater visibility into financial, customer and sales data to make betterdecisions and expand the business.
- Solution: Managers and executives used business intelligencetools to create standard and ad hoc reports.
- Results: Company executives and managers now have instantaccess to the business data they need to act proactively. They can create customdashboards with KPIs relevant to their areas of focus and share the goals andperformance details with their teams without having to request a custom reportfrom IT.
Sabre Airline Solutions: BI Accelerates Business Insights
Sabre Airline Solutions provides booking tools, revenue management, web and mobileitinerary tools, as well as other technology, for airlines, hotels and othercompanies in the travel industry.
- Challenge: The travel industry is remarkably fast paced. AndSabre's clients needed advanced tools that could provide real-time data oncustomer behavior and actions.
- Solution: Sabre developed an enterprise travel data warehouse(ETDW) to hold its enormous amounts of data. Sabre executive dashboards providenear real-time insights in user-friendly environments with a 360-degree overviewof business health, reservations, operational performance and ticketing.
- Results: The scalable infrastructure, graphic user interface,data aggregation and ability to work collaboratively have led to more revenueand increased client satisfaction.
Spear Education: BI Streamlines Internal Processes and Workflow
Spear Education is a leader in continuing education for dentists.
- Challenges: Spear's phone system was lacking functionality thatcould make its customer service reps work more efficiently and provide bettercustomer service. For example, their phone system didn’t record calls andwasn’tconnected to a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
- Solution: After some research, Spear connected its call centersoftware with its BI solution to maintain more thorough customer interactionrecords and provide a complete view of customer interactions.
- Results: After implementing a new solution for their contactcenter, Spear increased agent efficiency and saved the company 35 hours of reptime per week. Spear's agents now reinvest that time by placing 4,000 moreoutbound calls every week.
Univision: BI Increases Market Spend Efficiency
Univision is an American Spanish-language, free-to-air television network. It’sthelargest provider of Spanish-language content in the country.
- Challenge: Univision wanted more visibility into its data tounify and focus on targeted ad campaigns.
- Solution: Programmatic TV is an automated and data-drivenapproach to buying and delivering ads against video content on television,including ads served across the web, mobile devices and connected TVs, as wellas linear TV ads served across set-top boxes. With BI powered with informationfrom applications like Facebook, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, thecompany can obtain more value from its programmatic advertising.
- Results: Univision achieved an 80% growth in yield during thefirst quarter after implementing business intelligence.
New York Shipping Exchange: BI Reduces IT Dependency
New York Shipping Exchange (NYSHEX) is a shipping-technology company working toimprove the process of shipping overseas.
- Challenge: To make sense of overall company performance, NYSHEXwould manually extract data from its proprietary application and various cloudapps and then import it into Excel. This was a laborious process and few peoplehad access to the data, and most of the requests for reports fell on theengineering team to execute.
- Solution: NYSHEX invested in BI, centralized its data into onesystem and gave the entire company access empowering those with no codingknowledge to dive deep into analysis.
- Results: Thanks to business intelligence and other efforts, in2019, the company more than tripled its volume shipping between Asia and U.S.
Stitch Fix: BI Connects Departments, Data and Processes
Stitch Fix provides online personal clothing and accessory styling services. Thecompany uses recommendation algorithms and data science to personalize clothingitems based on size, budget and style.
- Challenge: The company wants to reduce returns, keep repeatcustomers and generate word-of-mouth business with recommendations fromcustomers to their friends and family.
- Solution: Stitch Fix collects data within BI throughout thebuying process, meaning the more a customer shops with Stitch Fix, the betterthe styling team comprehends their taste in clothing. The company hiredastrophysicists to decode the different personal stylecomponents—intricate workthat would be impossible without the powerful analytics of BI.
- Results: Using business intelligence to profile buyers andtheir preferences, the company, which started in 2011, reported a customer baseof 3.4 million in 2020 and revenues of $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2020.
SKF: BI Streamlines Manufacturing Processes
SKF is a Sweden-based global manufacturer and supplier of bearings, seals,mechatronics and lubrication systems with 17,000 distributor locations.
- Challenge: SKF's broad geographic coverage and productdiversity required consistent market size and product demand forecasting toadjust its manufacturing. The company needed to simplify the complex Excel filesused to produce a demand forecast.
- Solution: Management realized it needed to implement a businessintelligence to serve as a single source of reliable information. Maintainingthe system is easier than trying to manage everything with Excel, and nowemployees don’t have to rely on outdated spreadsheets and can accesssimple-to-understand reports and dashboards.
- Results: By centralizing data assets into a single system, SFKwas quickly able to share data and analyses between several departments —including sales, manufacturing planning, application engineering, businessdevelopment and management. SKF now combines demand forecasts betweendepartments and has improved the planning process.
Expedia: BI Builds Customer Satisfaction
Expedia is the parent company of some top-tier travel companies, including Expedia,Hotwire and TripAdvisor.
- Challenge: Customer satisfaction is essential to the company'smission, strategy and success. The online experience should mirror a good tripexperience, but the company had no visibility into the voice of the customer.
- Solution: The company had mountains of data they were manuallyaggregating, leaving little time for analysis. Using business intelligence, thecustomer satisfaction group was able to analyze customer data from across thecompany and link results with 10 objectives related directly to corporateinitiatives. Owners of those KPIs build, manage and analyze data to discovertrends or patterns.
- Results: The customer service team can see how well it is doingagainst KPIs in real-time and take corrective steps if necessary. Plus, otherdepartments can use the data. For example, a travel manager can use BI todiscover high volumes of unused tickets or offline booking and create strategiesto adjust behavior and increase overall savings.
Use Cases: Examples of Business Intelligence Strategies Prominent Companies Use
The most successful companies use BI to drive revenue, customer loyalty, operationaleffectiveness, ad delivery, drive shareholder value, predict customer behavior and developnew business opportunities.
Examples of How Leading Companies Use BI to Propel Their Success
What companies use business intelligence? From financial institutions like American Expressto social media giant Facebook and outdoor retailer REI, the most advanced and successfulcompanies in the world leverage BI. Here’s how some are using BI to power theirprosperity.
American Express:
Business intelligence is instrumental in the finance industry. American Express hasbeen using the technology to develop new payment service products and market offersto customers. The company's experiments in the Australian market have rendered itcapable of identifying up to 24% of all Australian users who will close theiraccounts within four months. Using that information, American Express takes steps toretain customers. BI also helps the company accurately detect fraud and protectcustomers whose card data may be compromised.
Chipotle Mexican Grill:
The restaurant chain has more than 2,400 restaurants worldwide. It implemented BI totrack operational effectiveness. Chipotle can now monitor every restaurant'soperational efficiency and serve up detailed information in dashboards. Bystandardizing the reporting and working from the same data ecosystem, Chipotle wasable to make uniform KPIs for benchmarking and sharing improvement and successstories. That solution saves thousands of hours for the company.
Coca-Cola:
With 35 million Twitter followers and a whopping 105 million Facebook fans, Coca-Colabenefits from its social media data. Using AI-powered image-recognition technology,the company can tell when photographs of its drinks post online. This data, pairedwith the power of BI, gives the company important insights into who is drinkingtheir beverages, where they are and why they mention the brand online. Theinformation helps serve consumers more targeted advertising, which is four timesmore likely than a general ad to result in a click.
Delta Airlines:
Big data and BI support customer service and differentiate the Delta experience.Flight attendants now have the tools to personally thank and recognize valuedcorporate travelers. Positive customer experience coupled with thoughtful programshelp position Delta as a leader in the business travel space. While any Deltacustomer can receive personal recognition, the airline goes the extra mile to servecorporate travelers and its medallion members. This enhancement provides moreopportunities to thank flyers and build customer loyalty.
Ellie Mae:
The company processes 35% of U.S. mortgage applications. Record low-interest ratescreated a high demand for loan processing. To make data more accessible for lenders,Ellie Mae developed a hosted data warehouse model that allows lenders to analyzedata by connecting a BI application directly to their systems without replicatingthe data to a local data warehouse. Capital market teammates can use that data tonavigate volatile markets, allowing them to provide excellent service and processloans for their customers.
Lowe's:
The home improvement company uses business intelligence to merge what the customertells them with actual behavior occurring online and in the store. They use thisdata to discover deeper insights that lead to better product assortment and staffingat specific store locations. The process of data analysis drives sales and alsoserves the customer. For instance, Lowe's uses predictive analytics to load trucksspecific to individual zip codes, so the right store gets the right type and amountof product.
Netflix:
The online entertainment company's 148 million subscribers give it a massive BIadvantage. How does Netflix use business intelligence? Netflix uses data in multipleways. One example is how the company formulates and validates original programmingideas based on previously viewed programs. Netflix also uses business intelligenceto get people to engage with its content. The service is so good at targeted contentpromotion that its recommendation system drives over 80% of streamed content.
REI:
REI uses its business intelligence platform for customer segmentation analysis, whichhelps inform decisions like member lifecycle management, shipping methods andproduct category assortments. BI-based decisions also inform member acquisitioninitiatives with detailed demographics on factors such as gender to personalize ads.The insights from BI help determine everything from how to display content on thewebsite and how to segment email campaigns.
Starbucks:
Through its popular loyalty card program and mobile application, Starbucks ownsindividual purchase data from millions of customers. Using this information and BItools, the company predicts purchases and sends individual offers of what customerswill likely prefer via their app and email. This system draws existing customersinto its stores more frequently and increases sales volumes.
Tesla:
The innovative automotive company uses BI to connect their cars wirelessly to theircorporate offices to collect data for analysis. This approach links the carmaker tothe customer and anticipates and corrects problems such as component damage, trafficor road hazard data. The result is a high customer satisfaction score andbetter-informed decisions on future upgrades and products.
Twitter:
The social media company deploys BI with AI to fight inappropriate and potentiallydangerous content on its platform. Algorithms rather than human users identify 95%of suspended terrorism-related accounts.
BI and AI also support fine-tuning to improve the overall user experience. Twitterpersonnel and its business intelligence tools monitor live video feeds andcategorize them based on subject matter. They use this data to enhance searchcapabilities, and help algorithms identify videos users might be interested inviewing.
Uber:
The company uses business intelligence to determine multiple core aspects of itsbusiness. An example is surge pricing. Algorithms monitor traffic conditions,journey times, driver availability and customer demand in real-time, meaning pricesadjust as demand rises and traffic conditions change. Dynamic pricing in real-timeaction is akin to what airlines and hotel chains use to adjust cost based on need.
Walmart:
The retail behemoth uses BI to understand how online behavior influences online andin-store activity. By analyzing simulations, Walmart can understand customerpurchasing patterns, for example, how many eyeglass exams and glasses are sold in asingle day, and pinpoint the busiest times during each day or month.
How to Improve Your Business Intelligence to Make Your Company a Leader
BI and tools like AI may seem complicated. However, current user interfaces arestraightforward and easy to use. So even smaller companies can take advantage of data tomake profitable and positive decisions.
Examples of Business Intelligence Tools and Techniques
What are examples of business intelligence tools? Predictive modeling, data mining andcontextual dashboards or KPIs are just some of the most common BI tools. Here are more toolsand how they’re used.
Analytics:
A BI technique that probes data to extract trends and insights from historical andcurrent findings to drive valuable data-driven decisions.
Dashboards:
Interactive collections of role-relevant data are typically stocked with intuitivedata visualizations, KPIs, analytics metrics and other data points that play a rolein decision-making.
Data mining:
This practice uses statistics, database systems and machine learning to uncoverpatterns in large datasets. Data mining also requires pre-processing of data.End-users use data mining to create models that reveal patterns.
Extract Transfer Load (ETL):
This tool extracts data from data-sources, transforms it, cleans it in preparationfor reports and analysis and loads it into a data warehouse.
Model visualization:
The model visualization technique transforms facts into charts, histograms and othervisuals to support correct insight interpretation.
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP):
OLAP is a technique for solving analytical problems with multiple dimensions fromvarious perspectives. OLAP is useful for completing tasks such as performing CRM data analysis, financial forecasting andbudgets.
Predictive modeling:
A BI technique that utilizes statistical methods to generate probabilities and trendmodels. With this technique, predicting a value for specific data sets andattributes using many statistical models is possible.
Reporting:
Reporting involves gathering data using various tools and software to mine insights.This tool provides observations and suggestions about trends to simplifydecision-making.
Scorecards:
Visual tools, such as BI dashboards and scorecards, provide a quick and concise wayto measure KPIs and indicate how a company is progressing to meet its goals.
Examples of Business Intelligence Trends
BI is continually evolving and improving, but four trends – artificial intelligence,cloudanalytics, collaborative BI and embedded BI – are changing how companies are usingexpansivedata sets and making decisions far easier.
Artificial intelligence:
AI and machine learning emulate complex tasks executed by human brains. Thiscapability drives real-time data analysis and dashboard reporting.
Cloud analytics:
BI applications in the cloud are replacing on-site installations. More businesses areshifting to this technology to analyze data on demand and enrich decision-making.
Embedded BI:
When BI software is integrated into another business application, it’s calledembedded BI orembedded analytics. Some of the benefits of embedded BI include enhancedreporting functionalities, and it’s been shown to improve sales and increasecustomer retention.
Many companies look to cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) instead of on-premisesoftware to keep up with growing warehousing requirements and faster implementations. Agrowing trend is the use of mobile BI to take advantage of the proliferation of mobiledevices.
Examples of Business Intelligence Software and Systems
BI software and systems provide options suited to specific business needs. They includecomprehensive platforms, data visualization, embedded software applications, locationintelligence software and self-service software built for non-tech users.
Here are some examples of the latest BI software and systems:
Business intelligence platforms:
These are comprehensive analytics tools that data analysts use to connect to datawarehouses or databases. The platforms require a certain level of coding or datapreparation knowledge. These solutions offer analysts the ability to manipulate datato discover insights. Some options provide predictive analytics, big data analyticsand the ability to ingest unstructured data.
Data visualization software:
Suited to track KPIs and other vital metrics, data visualization software allow usersto build dashboards to track company goals and metrics in real-time to see where tomake changes to achieve goals. Data visualization software accommodates multiple KPIdashboards so that each team can set up their own.
Embedded business intelligence software:
This software allows BI solutions to integrate within business process portals orapplications or portals. Embedded BI provides capabilities such as reporting,interactive dashboards, data analysis, predictive analytics and more.
Location intelligence software:
This BI software allows for insights based on spatial data and maps. Similarly, auser can find patterns in sales or financial data with a BI platform; analysts canuse this software to determine the ideal location to open their next retail store,warehouse or restaurant.
Self-service business intelligence software:
Self-service business intelligence tools require no coding knowledge to takeadvantage of business end-users. These solutions often provide prebuilt templatesfor data queries and drag-and-drop functionality to build dashboards. Users like HRmanagers, sales representatives and marketers use this product to make data-drivendecisions.
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How NetSuite Improves and Increases the Value of BI for Your Organization
BI tools can have an enormous impact on your business. They can help you improve yourinventory control, better manage your supply chain, identify and remove bottlenecks in youroperations and automate routine tasks. But for BI tools to be most effective, you first haveto centralize data that’s stored in multiple disparate systems.
NetSuite business intelligence tools takethe data stored in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and provides built-in,real-time dashboards with powerful reporting and analysis features. By centralizing datafrom your supply chain, warehouse, CRM and other areas with an ERP, NetSuite businessintelligence tools can help you identify issues, trends and opportunities, along with theability to then drill down to the underlying data for even further insight.
It’s likely your business has large amounts of data that could be used to boost yourprofitability. The challenge is organizing and structuring your data in such a way that youcan then glean insights. From there, you need to create clear, concise and actionablereports and data visualizations and distributing them to key stakeholders on your team. Noneof this can be done without advanced software, such as ERP products that collect and manageall your data.
