Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the use of technology to collect and effectively use information to improve business effectiveness. The main purpose of BI is to support better business decisions making. Thus, BI is also described as a decision support system.
BI enables your organization to track, understand, and manage your business in order to maximize enterprise performance. With a BI solution, organizations are able to improve operational efficiency, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings. In enterprise networks, BI provides employees with information to make better business decisions, and is deployed in applications that allow organizations to deliver new services and build stronger relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet. Organizations must understand and have constant visibility into their key performance indicators and metrics that span across their organizations. By doing this, organizations ensure their strategy is aligned from top to bottom and across the organization from marketing to sales to manufacturing to human resources.
The business benefits of a BI are numerous. These benefits can be grouped into three main categories: lowering costs, increasing revenue, and improving customer satisfaction among many others.
The benefits of a BI:
- Lowering costs by improving operational efficiency, eliminating report backlog and delays, negotiating better contracts with suppliers and customers, finding root causes and taking accurate actions, identifying wasted resources and reducing inventory costs, and leveraging your investment in your data warehouse.
- Increasing revenue by providing information to customers, partners and suppliers, improving strategies with better marketing analysis, and empowering your sales force.
- Improving customer satisfaction by giving users the means to make better decisions, providing quick answer to user questions, and challenging assumptions with factual information.
This way, BI systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data.
The following figure summarizes a common BI cycle:
The implementation of a BI solution involves several steps during its development and can be summarized in 4 main activities:
- Analysis of the multiple data and systems sources which gather the information throughout the company.
- Information from the data sources goes through a process known as ETL -- Extracting data from the outside sources,Transforming it to fit business needs and ultimately Loading it into a universal data base known as data warehouse.
- After the ETL process, the information is stored in a data warehouse. The data warehouse is a repository of stored data and becomes the single point of truth.
- Finally, reporting and analytic tools are used to analyze the information in the data warehouse.
