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Business Strategy
Implementing a business intelligence strategy at your company is one of the most effective ways to grow your business smarter, faster and easier. The actionable insights you gain from this information can benefit just about every aspect of your operations. In the modern business world, the companies leveraging business intelligence have a significant leg up on their competitors who aren’t using this strategy.
While it can be a daunting task to implement a BI strategy at your company, the efforts will be well worth the investment. You’ll gain clarity about a wide range of items, including changing trends, profitability improvements, your position within your market, and ways in which you can optimize your company’s performance.
One of the things making this process overwhelming in the early stage of business intelligence adoption is the multitude of BI tools available. Determining the right solutions for the specific needs of your company will be crucial to your ability to truly harness the full capabilities of your business intelligence strategy.
To help you better understand the top tools available to you, we recommend that you read the following article:
Top BI Software, Applications & Platforms Reviewed
This review was created by datapine, one of the leading business intelligence experts in the industry. Their team includes highly experienced data scientists, developers, academics and technological leaders who specialize in helping businesses gain actionable insights from the data they gather.
While this information can help jumpstart your efforts, it can often be helpful to work with an experienced business intelligence partner. Webolutions has been implementing business intelligence strategies for our clients for years. Our team will listen carefully to your needs to recommend the best solutions to grow your business. Our Real-Time Intelligence Dashboards™ make it easy to interpret your data, giving you the insights and perspective necessary to make informed decisions that will help your company thrive.
Free Business Intelligence Review
Key Takeaways from this Article
You have the ability to create a wide range of interactive dashboards which organize the information in the precise way you need it, providing up-to-date information and insights that can be used while this data is still fresh. In addition, these tools offer predictive analytics features which help you forecast upcoming trends. You can also create automated reports which are accessible to your entire team, making the process of identifying actionable items more efficient.
Benefits of Business Intelligence Tools
Business intelligence tools offer a wide range of benefits to both large and small companies. Regardless of the size and scope of your operations, BI tools allow you to effectively manage your data and organize it in a cohesive way that allows you to understand exactly what’s going on at your company. Some of the most important benefits you’ll experience include:
- Organize all your data in one place – Most businesses use a variety of different tools to gather data. When this information is siloed in different places, it becomes more challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of how different aspects of your operations are performing. Business intelligence tools will bring all of this data together in a centralized platform, making it easier to identify trends, issues and opportunities across your organization.
- Data is more accessible to all team members – The dashboards and automated reports generated by BI software tools are easily accessible to every member of your team, and very little training is required for individuals to leverage this valuable information. Because these BI reports and dashboards are easy to understand, even team members with novice data analysis skills will be able to leverage this information with relative ease.
- Predictions and business forecasting are much easier – Business intelligence tools make it much easier for your team to gain insights regarding future trends which may impact your business, market, and industry as a whole. This makes it much easier to take a proactive approach to these trends, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve.
- Manual tasks are eliminated – Without a powerful business intelligence tool, this data must be managed in numerous spreadsheets. Creating these spreadsheets can be time consuming and interpreting the data on them can be challenging for individuals who lack sophisticated analytics skills. The automated reports and dashboards generated by BI tools eliminates the time consuming process of creating spreadsheets and analyzing the data contained in them. In addition, you’ll easily be able to customize your dashboards to create powerful, interactive presentations that make it easy for others to understand the insights contained in the data.
- Business costs are reduced – Business intelligence solutions make data gathering, analysis and reporting much faster and more streamlined. This allows your team to work more efficiently and make adjustments that will boost profitability faster. In fact, a study conducted by BI Survey found that over 50% of companies using business intelligence solutions reported both a reduction in costs and an increase in revenue.
- Access this information anywhere, anytime – The top business intelligence tools utilize a cloud-based model, giving you access to your dashboards and reports whenever you need them. As long as you have internet connectivity, you can review your data on any device.
Best Business Intelligence Tools to Grow Your Business
This article conducted a thorough analysis of business intelligence tools to generate a list of the top 14 solutions on the market. Their process involved evaluating expert software comparisons and user reviews from two of the most prominent BI advisory and research companies – Capterra and G2Crowd. The list generated here includes the BI software platforms that achieved the best rankings on both websites. In order to be considered, the tool needed a minimum of 50 reviews between the two sites.
The top 14 tools are listed below. For a comprehensive discussion of each solution’s key features and shortcomings, read the full article.
- datapine
- SAS Business Intelligence
- Infor Burst
- SAP BusinessObjects
- Domo
- Oracle Business Intelligence
- Zoho Analytics
- MicroStrategy
- Dundas BI
- GoodData
- IBM Cognos Analytics
- QlikView
- Board
- Yellowfin BI
Using this Information to Determine the Right BI Solution for Your Company
While all of the solutions listed above are highly rated and do an excellent job, not all of them will be right for your company. In order to truly leverage all of the competitive advantages provided by business intelligence, you’ll need to select the right tool(s) to address your specific needs. This requires doing a little bit of planning before you start evaluating your options:
- Identify Your Goals for Your BI Efforts
- Business intelligence can deliver actionable insights on a wide range of items impacting every aspect of your business – make a list of the important goals you want to focus on with your BI efforts
- Keep your list to the most essential goals and metrics to move your company forward – focusing on too many items will make it harder to leverage these insights into truly actionable results
- Look for BI tools that are most effective at providing insights associated with the specific goals you’re trying to achieve
- Identify the Data You Need
- What types of data are needed to provide the insights you’re looking for?
- Which teams are most involved in using this data?
- Make sure these individuals are involved in assessing BI tools so that your solution will effectively address their needs
- What Types of Functionality Do You Need?
- What reports and dashboards will you need to leverage your data most effectively?
- How savvy is your team at evaluating this information? Do you need a solution that is accessible for individuals of all skill levels or a more sophisticated tool that requires extensive understanding of analytics?
- Look for solutions which offer the specific functionality to address the needs of your team
Let Webolutions Help
While the most advanced business intelligence tools can be easily used by your team, it will still require some skill and experience to set up your software and customize reports to the specific needs of your organization. If you have a team with the skill set to handle this, you’re all set. If not, it can be helpful to work with a third-party BI provider who can set your team up for success. Webolutions is here to help.
At Webolutions, we have extensive experience implementing business intelligence solutions for businesses in a wide range of industries. We understand the sophisticated nuances of the leading tools in the market, and we can recommend the right solution for your specific needs. In addition, we have the ability to work with any software tools you currently use to make the process as easy as possible for your team.
You’ll benefit from our Real-Time Intelligence Dashboards™, which provide you with the actionable insights you need in a format that is easy to understand. You’ll always receive the most current data, ensuring you can be proactive in your decision making. This will allow you to more effectively monitor changing trends as they develop.
To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Business Intelligence Review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.
Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.
Our specific areas of expertise include:
- Differentiating Brand Development
- Marketing & Communications Strategies
- Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
- Enterprise Website & Application Development
- Systems Integration
- Organizational Development Strategies
- Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
- Business Performance Intelligence Systems