4 types of analytics help companies make data-driven decisions in an uncertain business environment. Using the BI solution, companies can examine historical data, identify problems and their root causes, make forecasts and even get recommendations on what action to take.

Don't outrun the competitors

A company may engage in many activities, such as having regular promotions, communicating with loyal customers, redesigning its website, or making changes to its product or service portfolio, but see no impact of these efforts on its market position.

BI allows a company to analyze customer and financial data to understand their customers' preferences and values. This is how the company can determine what needs it needs to meet to gain more profit and meet customer needs better than its competitors. A closer look at the market data that BI enables help to define their own and their competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

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Missing quick information about business activities

Companies that do not have up-to-date information about their business activities cannot respond when their immediate intervention is needed. For example, a company that receives production quality control results the following week instead of receiving at least daily updates is at risk of failing to take corrective action promptly. For example, this manufacturer may fail to notice a problem in the design of the product, which would result in several defective batches.

A BI solution enables real-time data analysis and the use of pre-built and ad hoc reports. With self-service BI ad hoc reporting takes days or weeks, as it is created by the end-users themselves rather than the analysts. In addition, BI solutions are available for both desktop and mobile users, allowing busy managers and senior specialists to access the data easily and without delay.

Poor performance monitoring

It is common for companies to have their departmental and individual KPIs in separate spreadsheets, but this does not mean that this practice is effective. It takes significant analyst effort to bring all the isolated documents together to get a broader picture of overall business performance.

A centralized BI solution becomes a single source of truth – integrating and cleaning the data pulled from different data sources so that only high-quality and current data is available for KPI calculation. BI solution administrators set formulas for calculating each KPI and relevant thresholds, if any, unifying the calculation. Intuitive dashboards allow end-users to track how a company, department, or employee is performing against the target.

survey 91% of respondents say they would benefit from faster reporting, analysis, or planning; 84% – from better business decisions; 74% – through improved operational efficiency.

When a company improves operational efficiency, it can reduce its overall costs. Let's look at a company with 2,000 employees and assume that the company's costs are almost equal to its revenue, which is $1.2 billion per year (since the average revenue per employee is $0.6 million). Considering that implementing BI will help reduce overall costs by at least 1%, the company could save $12 million per year.

big data to introduce predictive maintenance when the current solution was not intended to support such scalability. Implementing major changes, for example, changing the architecture of the solution, involves high investments.

Our advice: Before implementing a BI solution, it is necessary to outline a clear BI strategy that aligns with both short and long-term (for 3 – 5 years) business goals. The strategy should reflect expectations regarding reporting needs, data sources, types of analytics applied, scalability of the BI system, technologies used, and more.

Not taking data quality into account

Low-quality data cannot form the basis for healthy BI that contributes to a company's success. Even the strongest enthusiasts of a deployed BI solution will soon stop using it should it produce misleading reports that contain errors. And poor end-user adoption means a return to old practices, rendering the investment and effort useless.

Our advice: With the adage 'garbage in – garbage out in mind, it would be wise for companies to check their available data and improve its quality if necessary. However, this one-time action is not enough to ensure the long-term health of a BI solution. To keep data up-to-date, complete, and accurate, a company needs to establish effective data entry and its data quality management process, which includes 4 key steps:

1. Promote the importance of data quality across the company: provide regular training, and introduce KPIs related to data quality.
2. Find primary sources of inaccuracies and input errors and work to eliminate them.
3. Drawing up rules and thresholds for data quality.
4. Constantly monitoring the quality of data.

Without taking into account evolution and support services

The successful launch of a BI solution seems like the right time to breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the results of the great work. However, users may still have new needs. For example, a diversified company may decide to integrate its disparate businesses and get a bird's eye view of reporting that would span all business directions.

Our advice: It makes sense to thoroughly research a potential BI vendor's service portfolio and find out what evolution and support services they offer, aside from pure implementation. It is better to select the supplier that provides a full range of services – implementation, support, and evolution – and can be responsible for all deliverables, rather than having separate suppliers providing a separate service. It is also necessary to realistically estimate new needs and plan the support budget accordingly.

Facing Poor User Adoption

Isn't it painful to see the solution, which required implementation efforts and cash investments, being abandoned by users? This scenario is quite realistic if users are not fully aware of the reasons for implementing BI or the capabilities the solution offers, or if they simply don't know how to work with it.

Our advice: It makes sense to involve the users from the beginning – already in the phase of formulating the needs of different departments. In addition, it is important to ask a BI vendor to provide special initial training aimed at different user groups. Also, after the training, the company should get some feedback to make sure users don't have unanswered questions about the BI solution.

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