Driving key decisions across a diverse range of business functions, data has occupied a firm niche as the foundation on which organizations base and build strategic blueprints. The advent of data transformation and its increasing influence on how companies structure their strategy results in them generating vast quantities of data from various touchpoints. However, a pertinent question here would be – Are companies optimizing advanced business intelligence techniques to analyze the sheer volume of data they collect and break it down to derive value-driven insights?
Business Intelligence is a complete suite of capabilities that a business can harness to arrive at strategic decisions firmly rooted in data. Power BI, for instance, is described by Gartner as the leading player here, used by 96% of Fortune 500 companies, constituting almost 5 million users.
Right from compiling, segregating, and storing this data to wading through complex datasets to unveil impactful patterns for business growth, an advanced business intelligence solution like this can assist companies with a wide variety of functions.
Not tapping into the complete potential of your business intelligence solutions, however, can lead to randomly aggregated data clumps, isolated data sets that can’t be utilized for decision-making, and stakeholders not having a concrete dashboard of key metrics on which to base strategy.
Only 30% of data businesses collect is analyzed effectively, with over 73% of CxOs stating that they are yet to receive relevant actionable insights from their Power BI dashboards. This leads to massive blindspots when it comes to unearthing patterns and creating accurate reports around essential consumer behavior and product performance data points.
From Sensors to Systems: The Data Flow
Consider the diverse channels across which businesses can collect data and the vast number of options this presents for market research, client insights, and business growth. Each microscopic data point, down to a click or a comment, provides valuable ammunition to help them tweak their approach and cater to their consumers better.
Take transportation and logistics or manufacturing companies, for instance. Data is collected across the entire supply chain, from the digital systems used to log and process orders, sensors and devices onboard the fleet operated by the carrier, and the platforms used for warehouse operations and the last mile logistics.
However, as much as data is collated extensively from multiple platforms and fed into BI dashboards, optimizing resources to leverage this data is something that continues to constantly elude most businesses.
The Data Disparity in Business Strategy
Whether it comes down to a lack of personnel or awareness, most businesses just do the bare minimum when it comes to harnessing the data they collect and analyze using their business intelligence tools without utilizing its complete capabilities.
If this seems relatable to your business, stop and ask yourself these three questions,
- Does the data you collect across various sources integrate seamlessly into your analytics dashboard? Is the data accurate, up-to-date, and reliable?
- Is your dashboard equipped to detect patterns across this data, enabling you to slice and dice it to represent various consumer behavior patterns?
- Can you analyze the data you measure and represent them as actionable insights, visuals, and reports that can help drive business decisions?
If the answer isn’t a resounding yes for any of these questions, it might be time to think out a strategy that will enable you to delve deeper into the vast potential of the data available, integrate data flow from multiple channels easily, churn out informative reports, and outline a roadmap for long-term business decisions.
Redefine your Business Intelligence Strategy
Leveraging Power BI to its full capacity within all business activities and decisions can result in substantial benefits on an organizational level, such as
- Quick, effective data collation and integration from multiple source platforms
- High-value data visualization and insight extraction through meaningful reports
- Data and insight-driven business solutions across verticals and functions
Let’s dive into more detail in terms of how companies are leveraging leading business intelligence solutions to tap into a host of benefits.
- Data Transition: Streamlining your data flow is a crucial first step in effective data analysis. You must eliminate data silos and integrate flow from multiple data collection streams into a Data Warehouse or Data Lake. It is critical to ensure the security and integrity of the data during this process, as the data that traverses through the network is vulnerable to threat actors.
- Data Warehousing: Robust data warehousing is at the core of a scalable and reliable Analytics implementation. It ensures that the data from multiple streams and sources is optimized for secure access and remains ready for quick retrieval across multiple queries.
- Data Processing: Perhaps the most significant aspect of data analysis, these solutions ensure that the raw data you collect is duly processed and uniquely structured to paint a compelling picture. This ensures you uncover data patterns that help you make business decisions firmly rooted in value-driven insights.
- Data Visualization: The next step is creating a framework that lets you view pertinent insights in one glance, facilitating quick corrective action in real-time and prompting effective business decisions. By combining these elements in a single solution, advanced business intelligence dashboards can present unique, customizable dashboards that help present a quick snapshot of the story behind the data. This represents an end-to-end, exhaustive solution – from preparing and cleaning the collected data to visualizing it as a meaningful entity driving business decisions.
In addition, the data visualization aspect helps present key trends and behavioral metrics as well-structured stories, matching activities to results, elaborating on what’s worked well, and new developments in consumer demand in the market. This helps key stakeholders at the company ensure they’re on the same page regarding important business performance metrics and work together to piece together data-backed decisions and form a holistic strategy. The simple interface also enables them to assign and delegate action items tied to these decisions quicker, ensuring quicker turnaround on reacting to market threats or capitalizing on new opportunities.
The Way Forward: A Centralized Data Repository
The ability to build Power BI dashboards quickly, visualize data effectively, and accommodate real-time changes from multiple data sources is something only some businesses can handle in-house.
Turning to a proven solutions provider can also help free up important internal resources and facilitate a streamlined data analysis process. The data is automatically streamlined, cleaned, and visualized, acting as the core point of truth that can facilitate important business decisions. This frees up internal resources to focus on more critical functions, like interpreting the data patterns and developing strategic actions.
For instance, PWC, one of the world’s largest accounting firms, sought a solution to leverage data at every stage of the financial and operational cycle, establishing a 360-degree view of the process. By tapping into Power BI via a solutions provider, the team was able to build a robust, interactive dashboard that provides comprehensive data on the performances of individual businesses. This helped them customize each solution to unique client needs, build end-to-end reporting capabilities, and increase the value of private equity clients.
Looking closer to home, Trigent helped a 20-year-old third-party logistics company get an enhanced view of all their business data, collated and consolidated in one place. This enabled the leadership team to assimilate and analyze a wide range of transactional data across 85,000 shipments, delve into auto-generated interactive dashboards and reports, and drive a refined business strategy resulting in increased sales.
Similarly, Vodafone leveraged Power BI to build a solution that enhanced its payment resolution process. Their success buoyed them to experiment with the tool to drive refinements in other departments across the organization, leading to a holistic replacement of several traditional processes with modern ones built on the back of niche data insights and information.
Getting Started with Power BI Integration
To ultimately tap into the transformative capabilities of Power BI, simply adopting it in your organization\’s day-to-day activities will not suffice. A holistic integration across the decision-making pipeline is required, resulting in a clear cause-and-effect relationship between extracting valuable insights and executing strategic decisions.
Understanding the nuances of data patterns is pivotal to achieving this. This is where turning to a proven partner can be beneficial, helping you approach the entire process in an evolved, sophisticated manner.
As pioneers in implementing this, Trigent’s collaboration with businesses has driven tangible results. From accomplishing a 40% increase in data-driven decision-making to streamlining sales & and operations processes with real-time insights, businesses can leverage our BI offering to reduce operational costs and generate higher margins consistently.
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