Business intelligence works wonders for enabling small, medium, and large businesses by optimizing decision-making and enhancing performance. Our guide below strives to help you develop an understanding of business intelligence, different business intelligence software, and how they can help make your business a cut above the rest.

Business Intelligence (or BI) refers to anything or everything that can help enhance a business’s or an organization’s performance ranging from the best business practices to software, infrastructure, and other tools. It is essentially information analysis, which involves retrieving information from different parts of the business and then converting it into reports, charts, and other mediums.

BI can be used for looking into any aspect of your business, such as to see how well your sales efforts are doing, for measuring staff performance, and for assessing the efficiency of your manufacturing process.

Small businesses usually hesitate to use business intelligence or business intelligence software because they simply aren’t aware of its benefits. However, once you become aware of the following benefits of BI, you would be more convinced about using it for your small business:

• It makes arriving at informed decisions much easier.
• It is a structured way that helps improve the efficiency of business operations.
• It helps to enhance the quality of customer service.
• It gives a competitive advantage to small businesses even over larger businesses.

Business Intelligence software is designed specifically for analyzing all the business data. Data is analyzed through automated processes, which provides a comprehensive insight into the organization’s potential strengths and weaknesses. The software plays an integral role in allowing management to clearly see the relationship between different data for better decision making and deployment of resources. Here’s how business intelligence software can give your business a competitive edge:

1. Gain valuable insights into your business

Using this software, you can have a clear picture of your business operations. Resultantly, you can make correct and prompt decisions that can ensure your company’s growth and desired revenue.

2. Address urgent issues

A plethora of issues can arise anytime and can leave a negative impact on your business growth. Therefore, you require keeping a close eye on such issues so that you can address them at the earliest. Doing so otherwise is difficult but using a business intelligence software can make it all easy. As the software generates insights in minutes, it prevents the problems from escalating and getting out of control.

3. Get the bigger picture

Business intelligence software is designed to provide management executives with a bird’s eye view of the organization’s overall performance. You can easily analyze business health across a threshold range and can access the snapshots of your company’s progress whenever desired. These timely insights can enable you to enhance or maintain the performance level of your company.

4. Predict the future

Anticipating future outcomes is of paramount importance for a business’s agility and flexibility. While using quality business intelligence software, you can easily predict or forecast your business performance based on the current patterns.

The following are some of the leading business intelligence software, which you can choose as per your unique business requirements:

• Cluvio
• Manta Flow
• Tableau Server
• Domo
• Sisence
• Looker
• QlikView
• Adjust
• Board
• UltiPro
• Deltek Vision
• ClicData
• Yellowfin
• SAP Crystal Reports