Guide To Successful Implementation Of Business Intelligence

Business owners no longer run their businesses solely on hunches or gut feelings. Whether small or huge, successful companies now collect and process customer data to analyze market patterns and predict future trends in the industry.

They also effectively monitor their expenditures, customer engagement, and other core business factors by employing Business Intelligence. BI is ideal for maximizing data efficiency, improving in-house processes, identifying and fixing shortfalls, and offering that competitive advantage to outrank competitors.

As a result, more business owners continue to adopt and explore this business goldmine to stay ahead of the curve. That is why the global business intelligence market size, which was exhibited at USD 27.24 billion in 2022, will continue to grow and reach USD 54.9 billion by 2032. The growth will be at a CAGR of 7.26% during the forecast period.

If you would like to jump on the train and increase revenue with BI, this article will discuss the business intelligence implementation steps, importance, and tools for the process.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence comprises a set of instruments, apps, and solutions to garner business data for increased productivity and sales. BI solutions often include advanced data analytics, such as data collecting, predictive analytics, text mining, statistical analysis, and big data analytics. 

Now, with an increasingly competitive market, entrepreneurs constantly look for added advantages to stay ahead, especially with the use of valuable tools like BI intelligence. This explains why the worldwide BI market value can only continue to grow over time.

More entrepreneurs realize that BI implementations can help to achieve overall growth by gathering valuable data depending on the business goals, including customers’ behavior, purchasing patterns, and other helpful business information. Having all this data helps to customize services, define current strategies to raise sales and revenue, predict future market trends, and more for company expansion.

The Importance Of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence involves the holistic process of collecting, storing, and analyzing business-related information. This data is then used to reach informed data-driven business decisions based on the detailed report presented.

Now, let’s see what activities regular business intelligence process steps cover.

• Data arrangement. All the information garnered from several sources can be arranged for more analysis and pattern identification to help you achieve your company goals. 
• Benchmarking. Previous data dating back to months or years are displayed on customized dashboards, so you can compare the numbers against your current performance metrics to see how and when you can reach your business goals. 
• Querying. BI collects, organizes, and interprets in-depth data so that you can easily find answers to precise business-related queries.  
• Data representation. Your data can be shown in charts, graphs, tables, and histograms to help visualize numbers and estimations more understandably.
• Descriptive and statistical analysis. BI allows you to identify weak spots and then find the causes and solutions for unexpected developments.
• Reporting. All created reports are sent to the stakeholders to aid in further business decisions. 

With effective business intelligence implementation, you can leverage every piece of valuable information to drive sales and increase the value of your business.

You should consider BI implementation if your business suffers:

• Insufficiently productive staff
• Clients outflow
• Wasted resources and time
• Under/overstocking
• Vast underutilized data amount

In summary, implementing business intelligence will help your business profit from collecting and organizing already existing data.

What Can You Get From BI Implementation?

BI is an efficient way to enhance a company’s overall performance. Most business owners use business intelligence to aid in making informed business-related decisions from analytics and numbers. 

But that’s not all. Let’s see other benefits of BI implementation.

Detect the company’s flaws 

With the information and numbers collected, you can get a holistic picture of your business performance. Visualization simplifies data presentation, so it’s easier to spot the business’s flaws and weak spots, monitor the latest market trends, and keep the business owner informed of the company’s numbers and progress.

Real-Time Agility

In this modern, fast-paced world, if it takes more than a week to prepare reports, the data you have collected may likely be obsolete when you want to use it. 

BI implementation provides instant access to all essential data and allows you to be proactive, rather than reactive in your business choices. 

Proper decision-making

You can use BI dashboards to study the trends in your industry, your competitors, and the strengths and weaknesses of your company to make future predictions. Equipped with this data, you can predict potential market shifts and implement strategies to keep you ahead of the curve. 

Additionally, because the data is shown in real time, businesses can use the information collected to make quick and better decisions to achieve their goals without compromising the company’s reputation.

Conducting experiments and measuring outcomes

BI solutions help simplify marketing activities so marketers can track and guide potential customers through the funnel, create a product-market fit, assess the marketing experiments’ performance, and measure business metrics against KPIs. 

The reports then help the marketers determine what steps to tweak or maintain to build customers’ strength and engagement.

Business Intelligence Step-by-step Implementation

Most businesses do not maximize all the data at their disposal because they lack the right tools. But with a well-planned and configured business intelligence implementation, C-level executives and their departments can better understand their processes, results, and customers.

Let’s carefully examine the step-by-step business intelligence implementation by Broscorp.

1. Create A Business Intelligence Implementation Strategy

Creating a BI implementation strategy is necessary for businesses to measure performance, identify flaws, build competitive advantages, build competitive advantages, and employ data mining, and analytics for successful business decision-making. 

The fundamental step of the preparation phase is discovering your goals for BI implementation. You can find these by asking the following questions:

• What do you hope to achieve by implementing BI?
• What is the result you would like to achieve?
• Do you want to be more efficient with your operations or your workforce?
• Do you want to boost sales or improve customer satisfaction?
• What data can you gather for reporting or need to have analyzed?
• Do you want something that integrates all your data and produces charts and reports?
• Do you want something to integrate with your existing systems or something that replaces what you already have?

The answers to these questions will help you to understand your priorities and create a long-term custom BI implementation plan for your business. This stage also helps reduce the development time and defines the required features and scope.

2. Define KPIs To Be Subject To BI 

With all the data at your disposal, you will now need to define the KPIs to track throughout the company and within the departments.

These key performance indicators help you monitor progress in your industry. However, they should be measurable, clear, and aligned with your company’s objectives.

These questions will help you identify your KPIs

• Which resources for data will you use? (web analytics, CRM, other external sources, etc.)
• What type of data will you collect to analyze? (sales numbers, website traffic, customer engagement, etc.)
• Who should this data be available to? (managers, marketers, data analysts, others)
• What type of reports do you need? (spreadsheets, charts, diagrams, or personalized dashboards)

3. Find A Competent Software Development Vendor/Team

A BI developer is a professional that focuses on the user end of the data funnel.

It would be best if you considered employing the services of a BI developer when your business needs are purely analytical and reporting rather than data processing and integration. 

However, if you are considering creating a data platform or lake/warehouse/data integration tools, you have to think of hiring a dedicated BI Development Company with the following people on board: ETL developer, data lake/warehouse developer, data engineer, and BI developer.

You can check platforms like Goodfirms or Clutch that provide information about businesses in an industry. They also offer reviews, ratings, and firsthand comments about companies in the IT industry.

In our guide, How To Hire BI Development Company, we have discussed what a good business intelligence developer should know and where to find a BI team.

4. Describe the main technical requirements

Selecting the ideal BI software is often one of the most complex technical business intelligence implementation steps. Then you should also consider the prepared specifications, objectives, and niche to determine if you’d go for the range of existing BI solutions or from-scratch software development.

Note: While selecting from existing BI solutions will provide fundamental features and others that you may not need, implementing from scratch will give you features and functionality tailored toward achieving your business goals.

After deciding the requirements and features and which BI solution works for your business, select the leading technologies for the project. Ensure that you communicate the particular type of experience and expertise you require to your BI company.

Here are some of the technologies used by data engineers. This checklist includes but is not limited to the following:

• Language: Java, Python;
• Databases: SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Clickhouse;
• BI tools: Power BI, Power View,  Power Pivot, Performance Point, Tableau, Apache Superset;
• Big Data: Flume, Spark, Nifi, Kafka, Flink;
• Cloud providers: AWS, Azure, Google cloud.

5. Development 

Next, we develop a solution. With the previously completed phases of the business intelligence implementation plan, the implementation will be seamless. 

For the development, the company  should follow these essential steps for successful BI implementation:

• Collect data from several sources
• Implement a data model in the database
• Include data sources in your BI solution and create custom ETL solutions if needed,
• Additionally, to maximize the data, you should comb your data to fix or remove unclear, random, or outdated information. This will ensure that your search is streamlined and your audience is quickly reached.

Also, ensure that there are checkpoints to evaluate the data quality at set intervals. 

6. Optimization

At this step, we work on support features, improving your BI solution, and training new users. 

We understand that most people experience difficulties accepting innovations. So, we can hold training to explain the role of business intelligence in organizations and how it can assist employees in gaining new knowledge and increasing productivity.

At Broscorp, we also help companies keep up with updates after a successful BI implementation and optimize productivity while reducing expenses. As your business grows, your BI solution should scale up to meet the expansion. 

Why Choose Broscorp For Business Intelligence Implementation? 

With five years in BI development and consulting, we’re confident that our highly-qualified business intelligence developers will help you create comprehensive solutions to help your business grow. 

Our company builds BI solutions for businesses in fintech, telecom, accounting, and other industries. We can also develop custom business intelligence solutions that help companies improve strategic decisions, identify issues, discover potential trends, and find new revenue or growth opportunities.

We have helped numerous companies level up their Business Intelligence implementation:

• To help the team work better, we created an automated solution. The goal was to collect the results from multiple surveys, store results efficiently for further analysis, and prepare visual reports.

• We delivered a unique product aimed at serving Sweden’s small & medium businesses and improving their financial analysis experience. It integrates with local accounting services, calculates, loads information into the data warehouse, and creates comprehensive dashboards.

• A problem Broscorp solved was helping telecom companies improve their maintenance workflow by building a fully automated solution that autonomously collected real-time data from cell towers, loaded data into the warehouse, and created custom dashboards.

Our business intelligence development services:

Conclusion

Our team at Broscorp are professionals in BI implementation and will love to work with you on your next project. We offer thorough consultation and quality, personalized business intelligence services. If you have any questions about Business Intelligence implementation or BI strategy, contact our experts today!