What is business intelligence?

Business analysis, or in other words Business Intelligence (BI), according to encyclopedia, is nothing more than a specific process of collecting information that will be processed into knowledge. The result of the conducted business analysis is to develop a greater competitiveness of the company.

In reality, such an analysis does not quite fit into such a laconic formulation. In fact, it is a whole set of processes enabling the analysis of information that leads to building the appropriate forms of presentation of the collected data, and later on help the managerial staff make more appropriate and more favorable decisions for the company.

Simply put, business analysis (BI) is supposed to lead the company to obtain better results, increasing the company’s effectiveness based on conclusions drawn from the available data.

For what reason did the use of business intelligence (BI) begin?

At some point in the historical map of economic development, companies began to administer a huge database that was collected by various departments which gave the impression of being completely unrelated to any of them. The tools provided by the business analysis (BI) allows to combine the seemingly unrelated data. With their help, it is possible to weed out the insignificant data from the data that actually matters. Therefore, decisions that are optimally in the best interest of the company can be achieved by discovering new information, finding dependencies between the data, and drawing more accurate conclusions.

What are the benefits of business analysis (BI)?

Nowadays, we do not lack data. We generate such an enormous amount of data, that they become very diverse and disordered. The potential of data and subsequent conclusions are very valuable resources that allow us not only to maintain the company, but also to develop it in the most efficient way. Best practices and practices related to the business analysis are expected to have positive effect on competitive advantage.

The most important goal of implementing BI is to improve business performance and its competitiveness. Properly applied technology will allow you to obtain a number of other benefits such as:

• making decisions at a faster pace and with better results,
• better insight into operational and financial data,
• higher levels of service and transparency, regardless of the department,
• reduced inefficiencies,
• elimination of fraud and a higher level of organization,
• impact on increased data accuracy,
• better results that are strategic to the performance of established tasks,
• improved productivity and purposefulness among the team that will contribute to a desirable mindset,
• impact on growth rate from investment.

What are the areas of business analysis (BI)?

Business analysis is a great solution that is perfectly suited to such segments as:

• identifying financial gaps and improving a company’s financial performance,
• increasing production efficiency,
• creating financial analysis,
• determining market segment, in other words target group, on the basis of such data as gender, age, education, place of residence.

Thus, there is a huge potential in business analysis which allow different organizations to have a chance to find out which areas of its operation should be improved and how to achieve, for example, better financial results.

Who will benefit best from business intelligence (BI)?

It is difficult to give a straightforward answer to this question, but it is not without merit. The most important thing seems to be that for the company that decided to use BI solutions in its structures, such analysis should ultimately support better financial results. Factors such as the amount of analyzed data, as well as the degree of development of the company’s structures will be not without significance. Therefore, before introducing tools used in business analysis, it is worth adopting certain criteria that will help to estimate the sense of the implementation:

• annual turnover – if the turnover is at least 20 million PLN a year, we can already start considering the implementation of BI tools.  Such high turnover contains a very large amount of data that the company collects,
• employment – this is the most important guideline if the company does not achieve the turnover of the above-mentioned 20 million per year. Companies can benefit greatly if BI is implemented in a company with 30 employees.

Summarizing the potential of business analysis, its greatest advantage is undoubtedly the fact that by improving many processes occurring in the company, on many levels it should lead to gaining competitive advantage and as a result higher turnover. Naturally, improvement of the team’s attitude towards work, reduction of inefficiency, elimination of waste, or leading the service to a higher level must translate into the final, expected effect of better earnings.