Categories
Blog

Selecting a BI Solution for your Business

Companies may build products, analyze their advertising efforts, customize content, and create content strategies with the aid of data analysis. Data analytics can ultimately help firms increase performance and boost their bottom line.

Main factors to be aware of when selecting a BI solution for your business.

  • Ability to meet specific business needs
  • Ease of use
  • Cost for BI Solution
  • Technology to be used
  • Time Estimation
  • Limitations of BI solution
  • Product Scalability
  • Product Security
  • After service
  • Globalization growth

What kind of data do you want to analyze:

Before choosing the right BI tool, you need to know what kind of data you want to analyze. That is because different BI dashboards are designed for diverse types of data analysis. For example, suppose you want to analyze transactional data (e.g., sales transactions). In that case, a business intelligence tool designed for analyzing transactional data will be more useful than one designed for analyzing social media or other unstructured data sources. You should also think about if your company requires numerous platforms to manage different sorts of data or just one platform to handle all data. For instance, your company might need two different platforms if it must analyze and visualize both transactional and social media data. However, if it only needs to evaluate transactional data, a single platform should be adequate (e.g., sales transactions). The screening process will go much more smoothly if you define your BI tool’s purpose clearly.

Ability to meet specific business needs:

There are eight areas to be evaluated.

  1. Access data and create new dashboards: Access the data you need to build interactive dashboards without technical assistance. Technology helps users to develop dashboards in a low code manner.
  2. Customize existing dashboards: Easy to use tools to manipulate and visualize data exactly how you want.
  3. Drill into reports: Zoom into details and underlying data for enhanced analysis. Can add color rules. When needed, the report can warn the reader from colors.
  4. Interact from mobile: Share and analyze with dashboards directly from any mobile device. Today it supports various mobile operating systems. (Android OS.,   Apple iOS., Blackberry OS.)
  5. Data visualization: Capability to automatically transform data into Line charts, Area charts, Bar and column charts, Doughnut charts, Funnel charts, Gauge charts or other types of visual presentation.
  6. User-friendly interfaces: All the features of the BI must be easy to access. Also, mobile environments should offer responsive touch interfaces in a native app.
  7. Analytical capabilities of the BI solution:  It maximizes the opportunities for your organization.
  8. Checks Business Validations: This will ensure that business validations are followed correctly. Otherwise, the system can send alerts.

Ease of use:

  1. Accessibility, flexibility, and availability:  A BI solution should be easy for users across the organization to access whether they are in the office, working remotely, or on the road.
  2. Easiness to train team members/employees to use the solution
  3. Self-service capabilities: A good BI solution must be designed for businesspeople to use on their own as a self-service solution.
  4. Easy navigation across the solution: BI solution should be easy to navigate with point-and-click or drag-and-drop features. It should give users a choice of doing a task themselves or employing automation to handle it.

Cost for BI Solution:

  1. Accessibility, flexibility, and availability:  A BI solution should be easy for users across the organization to access whether they are in the office, working remotely, or on the road.
  2. Easiness to train team members/employees to use the solution
  3. Self-service capabilities: A good BI solution must be designed for businesspeople to use on their own as a self-service solution.
  4. Easy navigation across the solution: BI solution should be easy to navigate with point-and-click or drag-and-drop features. It should give users a choice of doing a task themselves or employing automation to handle it.

Cost for BI Solution:

Most BI tools have an initial cost, but there are also recurring expenses related to using them. These consist of maintenance expenses, consultation and training expenditures, and license renewal fees. Take a note that costs vary from one vendor to another, but here are some things you can expect to pay for:

  1. Pricing models: Some vendors charge per seat or per user, while others charge by the number of data sources in the system. The latter model is often more expensive because it requires more customization.
  2. Licensing fees: These fees may be based on the number of users or seats. Some vendors offer multiple license levels — such as basic, standard, or enterprise — and charge accordingly.
  3. Data management fees: If your organization needs help setting up datasets and loading them into the system, expect to pay extra for this service.

Any more information or demo we are willing to help Contact us

– Heaven Gunarathna

Categories
Blog

Importance of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) is a technological process of transforming data into action information for the benefit of stakeholders. This information helps executives, managers and workers make informed business decisions. Set of data which have been collected over a period or wide array is used as the base in BI solutions. BI solutions predominantly focused on business insights for the proactive decision making and used for planning and risk management purposes. However, BI solutions could be used to provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Business reporting, online analytical processing, data and process mining, text mining, complex event processing, benchmarking, business performance management are some common functions of business intelligence.

Business intelligence helps businesses to analyze customer behavior and competitor behavior, predict market or industry behavior, set benchmarks and track performance. Overall business performance and competition related decisions are fueled by the Business Intelligence functions. Insightful analysis discovers potential issues or problems for business’s contingency planning.

Different industries are aligned business intelligence tools to manage and coordinate its day-today operations.

Logistics Industry

Logistics is one of the most complicated industries which requires constant overlooking and immediate action based on delivery stage in the supply chain. Large data sets are processed and display through customized dashboards to track the orders effectively. Graphical representation methods being used to make the dashboards user friendly and informative.

Banking and Finance 

Financial and banking companies deal with large amount of data and requirement is to analyse data and identify marketing opportunities by combining advanced technologies such as Microsoft SQL, machine learning.  AI with cloud-based Power BI helps financial and banking companies collect, store, and analyze real-time data.

Construction Industry

Construction industry is complicated industry with multiple needs. It required fine deal with work schedules and deadlines, suppliers, and production processes. Collaboration and coordination for running everything smoothly and getting all the processes done is an integral part when it comes to construction industry. Business intelligence helps to project wise overlooking of all touchpoints in one place through all-inclusive dashboards.

Retail Industry

Stock following is one of the retailer’s prominent BI benefits from the time an order is delivered to the point of sale. BI use data warehousing to empower retailers to track the supply handing. In addition to tracking the orders, BI helps to determine the quantity based on the sales forecast and alerting to re-order on time. Human decision making on continuous supply is replaced with I suggestions on the process.

Manufacturing Industry

Industry-specific knowledge is vital for manufacturing businesses. Business Intelligence helps to analyze manufacturing process to identify the business process bottlenecks and establish effective and efficient process. BI serves as the primary source of structured and reliable solutions for bringing together all related processes to eliminate errors. Manufacturing processes can be easily optimized and improved through a manufacturing dashboard that integrates key data through real-time analysis, features vast interactivity and other features, and predicts what will happen in the future.

At CONIFS our mission is to transform treasure trove of transactional data sitting in your ERP into value generating information insights for decision makers. In our view implementing a BI solution in an organization is more of a business venture than a technical venture handled by few individuals in an isolated corner within IT department. We can help you to make a dream of holistic, robust, and user-friendly BI solution a reality.

Contact us