Business intelligence plays a leading role in the strategic planning of organizations and is used for numerous reasons, including gauging performance improvement toward business objectives, carrying out quantitative examination, reporting and data allocation, and recognizing customer insights. To this end, organizations gather data from internal IT systems and outside sources, prepare it for evaluation, run queries against the data and generate data visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results on hand to business users for effective decision-making and strategic planning.
BI is used as a basis for strategic decision-making removing as much of the conjecture and speculative guesses from the decision-making process as possible. Organizations collect the essential data, examine it, and ascertain which actions to take to meet their objectives.
On the technical front, raw data is gathered from the business’s activity; data is processed and then stored in data storerooms; and once it’s stored, the scrutiny process to answer business questions begins. BI applications help organizations to bring all these diverse sources into a single integrated view providing real-time reporting, dashboards, and analysis.
BI is more than just software; it’s a rounded enterprise to use data in everyday operations. Here are some of the fundamental benefits of business intelligence.
Business intelligence platforms are developed to do strong data processing in the cloud or on your company’s servers. These tools draw data from several sources into a data storeroom, and then examines the data consistent with user queries, drag-and-drop reports, and dashboards. BI helped Lenovo raise reporting proficiency by 95% across many departments.
BI offers leaders the capacity to access data and attain a rounded view of their processes, and the ability to benchmark results against the bigger organization. With an all-inclusive view of the organization, leaders can detect areas of opportunity. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer uses BI platforms to join forces among subdivisions and developed models to enhance patient diagnosis and quicker, better ways to execute clinical trials.
Having precise data and quicker reporting ability make for better business decisions. MillerCoors modified mobile dashboards for their sales team so they can view real-time data and sales predictions before going into meetings with potential customers. They can speak of customers’ or prospects’ needs assuredly and know the data is current. Leaders no longer have to wait days or weeks for reports and cope with the risk of data that may be obsolete.
Customer experience and satisfaction can be directly affected by business intelligence. Verizon installed BI systems across many departments, producing upwards of 1,500 dashboards for workers. These dashboards drew data from processes and text data from customer support chat sessions. Using this data, the American telecommunications giant managed to recognize opportunities to improve customer service and decrease support calls by 44%.
Companies can be more viable when they know the market and their performance within the market. Rosenblatt Securities, an institutional brokerage firm, evaluated data from scores of sources and managed to see the best possible time to enter and exit the market and position themselves purposefully. With BI, businesses can keep up with changes in the industry, monitor periodic changes in the market, and forestall customer needs.
IT departments and specialists barely take time out to respond to business user requests. Departments that previously had no access to their own data without communicating experts or IT can now jump into data analysis with little training. BI is intended to be scalable, providing data solutions to departments that need it and for employees who require data. Brown-Forman, one of the largest American-owned spirits and wine companies, scaled American interactive data visualization software company Tableau to 1,000 global users, and discovered that it fit well within their current data set-up.
BI systems increase data organization and examination. In conventional data analysis, different departments’ data is siloed and users have to access numerous databases to reply their reporting queries. Departments across a company can access the same data at one time. Award-winning marketing agency Tinuiti centralized over 100 data sources using BI technology, saving their customers hundreds of hours of analysis time.
The Challenge
Being one of the busiest airports, Heathrow International Airport manages over passengers 0.2m every day, which is a Herculean undertaking. The situation can be exacerbated by stormy weather, delayed and canceled flights, shifts in jet streams, etc, disrupting the airport’s smooth functioning. Given these issues, the airport needed a Central Management System that would use the huge amounts of data being produced by operational systems at the airport and convert it into useful visual insights.
Heathrow has deployed Microsoft Azure technology to gather data from back-end operational systems such as check-in counters, baggage tracking systems, flight schedules, weather tracking systems, cargo tracking and many more.
Power BI converts the rudimentary operational data into useful visuals showing different statuses and figures of the airport systems.
This data is about flight movements, security queues, passenger transfers, and immigration queues. Eventually, Power BI uses data from these Azure services for analysis and construal. Then, the ground staff use this information to appropriately run and manage passengers. Nearly 75,000 airport employees have information on their fingertips thanks to Power BI.
Here’s a list of some key business intelligence trends.
The four strong pillars of Power BI include: