Introduction
All our business strategies, whether long-term or short-term, are founded on a strong layer of business intelligence. Business intelligence is a term collectively used to represent tools and processes that are employed to glean insights from raw data (whether internal or external) to help make sound business decisions. Organizations use this insight to gain competitive advantage, exploit market opportunities, and make better decisions. These tools help businesses in their day-to-day decision-making through dashboards, powerful reporting, and creative visualizations. Reporting is a key feature of these BI platforms, which helps executives make timely, data-supported decisions. DIY is the current trend in BI, where executives get to generate interactive, insightful reports without any professional assistance. WovVTech, which has years of experience in supporting digitization and business transformation, offers WovVBI, a powerful, lightweight cloud-based solution that is supporting turnaround through analytics in more than 50 countries across the globe. In this blog, we will see how to select the right BI solution and how such solutions can benefit businesses.
How do I select the right BI solution?
In every vertical, businesses may have specific needs; however, the basic features remain the same across industries. With that in mind, we have done the hard work for you to zero in on the right business intelligence solution. Here are the tips:
Should resonate well in your ecosystem.
Well, in every setup, it makes perfect sense that your new software solution should be in congruence with the existing infrastructure. Go for a tool that seamlessly integrates with your reporting mechanism. It should be ready to retrieve data from multiple internal and external data sources.
What are your success criteria?
Are you looking for a tool to largely support historical data analysis, or will your emphasis be on predictive analysis? Or are you looking for both? The bottom line is: be 100% sure in your mind about key business requirements, and then, while evaluating the shortlisted business intelligence software, ensure your major business objectives are fulfilled.
Usability
What’s the point of having the best business intelligence platform if that’s too complicated for me to work through? The idea is that ease of use and intuitiveness cannot be compromised. Your business users may not be that tech savvy; besides, certain features may be too complex and time-consuming for a user to use them. So, have that thing in mind.
Key features like filtering and data drilldown
The right business intelligence forecasting and reporting solutions let you view the processed information from different angles: you can filter the records, you can search for specific terms, and you can sort the records. And, likewise, there is a provision to drill down on the data, taking you from a top-view to the most detailed, granular view. These features have to be there.
Security
Information security is uncompromising. Businesses need to protect their data, and within the organizational hierarchy, everybody does not have the same level of access, which means there has to be a role-based access mechanism. The central repository that stores the data should be unbreakable, and there must be proper encryption to ensure the data doesn’t fall into illegitimate hands. Cloud software has the upper hand in security. Our WovVBI is really impregnable and top-notch BI software for analytics; that’s something you can count on.
These are the key points that you need to keep in mind while selecting the right BI solution for your business. Now we move to the next point: what are the benefits that it offers?
How do the right BI platforms simplify analytics?
Reporting
Reporting is a must-have to get a grip on analytics. Today, BI tools have canned reports; the thing that can take you to the required insight is just a click on the right predefined report. These reports may be used to monitor KPIs from a variety of sources. Presenting insight in real time, these reports have charts, graphs, and other graphical features that make it possible to look at the data from various sources.
Business insights
The businesses get valuable insights on revenue, sales, productivity, and overall business performance. It helps businesses find their strengths and weaknesses, as then organizations will be able to understand what’s working and what’s not. One can easily track the KPIs that matter most to their business.
Competitive analysis
This is one thing that is going to hook the analysts right away. Yes, business analytics and reporting tools do provide a competitive edge. You get to see competitors sales by purchasing data from market research companies. This gives you a comparative insight into where you stand vis-à-vis them. Tracking other players’ sales and marketing performances also prepares you to differentiate your products and services accordingly.
Good data quality
It’s a big challenge to collect and place squeaky-clean data on your premises. The best bi-reporting platforms have provisions to integrate with various types of internal and external data sources (WovVBI, for example, can integrate with more than 50 databases like Yardi and Salesforce) to give a full picture of what’s happening in and around their organization.
By providing the right information at the right time,
Accuracy and speed of information sharing can make or break things. Failure to get the right information at the right time can lead to lost customers and revenue. The right BI software can help you deliver accurate and timely information to important stakeholders, optimizing time-to-decision. It can help you to listen to the voice of your customers and watch your competitors, improving your sales in the process.
So, in these points, we have touched upon how the right BI software can help you simplify analytics.
Conclusion
In today’s data-driven world, companies are facing information overload, and those looking to gain an advantage over others are leveraging technology to work smarter. These companies are investing in ways to understand and work with this information. The amount of data that we have in the world is doubling at a very fast pace, and the only thing that can act as our savior is business intelligence software. WovVBI from WovV Tech is the one you can count on. Even though there are many barriers to adopting new technology, business intelligence tools usually have a good payoff and provide immediate benefits.
