Business Intelligence Solutions
A smart approach to your long-term business needs
A proactive approach in prioritizing goals and future course of action equips businesses with an ability to cope up with adversities or tougher times like lockouts, recession and natural calamity
Business Intelligence (BI) is catching up the trend in present times, and businesses across various diversifications have shown their interest in keeping up with this latest trend. Conventional business processes used to yield a lot of raw and unstructured data that has to be firstly organized and later analyzed, which was a highly time-consuming activity. With the advent of cutting-edge technological solutions and an inflow of super-smart electronic gadgets, it has become comparatively easier to organize and analyze the data that can be further used to carve out newer strategies, prospects and opportunities.
Effective communication between the various departments of a business or organization is a vital element in decision making and formation of new strategies. Ranging from top management to the back-office or sales and marketing team to the procurement division, all have to be handy with information and data of their role in the organization.
Business Intelligence vs. Competitive Intelligence
Although both Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence support decision making at the end but the major difference lies in the fact that BI makes extensive use of processes, technologies, and applications to mostly explore and analyze internal data. Competitive intelligence relies on information about market trends and competitors. Hence, on a broader level, it can be stated that Business Intelligence is inclusive of a subset of Competitive Intelligence.
Business Intelligence makes use of various technological solutions that can be categorized as follows:
Reporting
Business Reporting, also known as Enterprise Reporting, commonly refers to public reporting of the operations and finances by the business establishments. The standard model for reporting uses the basics of ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) before its circulation via emails or printed material. Ongoing technological innovations have made it easier for the organizations to yield ‘Unified Reports’, which is a combination of views and opinions of individuals across various departments of the organization. In order to make a report ‘human-readable’, logical models are used, which in turn can place a query to the respective database and seed a solution.
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
The widespread uses of relational databases, data mining and report writing have been encompassed by online analytical processing (OLAP), which can solve multi-dimensional analytical queries. The practical applications of OLAP range from reporting for sales and marketing to management and budgets, forecasts and finances etc. OLAP has emerged as one of the most useful tools of Business Intelligence and its implementation across business establishments.
Apart from the above mentioned business processes, some other more common functions of business intelligence include predictive and prescriptive analytics, business performance management, risk analysis, data and process mining, benchmarking, text mining and complex event processing.
Following business areas can be influenced and strengthened by the implementation of business intelligence solutions:
Benchmarking/Measurement
The whole idea of business process management (BPM) and Metrics Reference Model is to create a hierarchy of performance metrics. This keeps the senior management informed and updated about the business goals and accomplishments.
Collaboration Platform
This is a new addition that enables the organizations to interchange electronic data and share it across various platforms (internally as well as externally) for mutual benefits.
Knowledge Management
A program that can be driven upon all these legends to identify and explore new ways of handling complex business events and situations is known as ‘Knowledge Management’ which is an essential part of Business Intelligence.
Synastute is capable of identifying your organizations need for implementing ‘Business Intelligence solutions’ for entire life cycle duration. The preparedness of any business for exploiting BI benefits depends upon three major factors:
- A thorough commitment and interest in sponsoring the BI project is expected from the senior management/ key decision makers.
- The intensity of the need or necessity for any business to implement BI.
- Finally the quantity, quality and accessibility of data available with the businesses.
