Outsmart The Competition With Business Intelligence

Every business collects internal data about company operations and processes. Increasingly, businesses are acquiring even more external customer data from mobile apps, websites and social media. Business Intelligence (BI) refers to methods and tools to collect and categorize this data which make it comprehensible, meaningful and actionable.

Business Intelligence software will help you turn this raw data into usable information. You can leverage the data you’re collecting now, and find ways to collect even more data. You can explore new ways to visualize and work with your data to find trends and recognize patterns. This becomes knowledge you can use to help your business stay ahead of the competition.

BI helps users make decisions based on hard figures instead of just assumptions. A major focus of BI is data analysis. Three main types are data mining, text analysis and business analytics. Data mining can be simply automated, grouping sets of data together to help you find correlations. Text analysis can go deep into social media reviews and feedback to gauge tone and general sentiment. This can help identify and predict customer behaviors. Business analytics help reveal inefficiencies in your processes and see opportunities to allocate resources differently.

With each successive layer of analysis, your data becomes more useful. Descriptive analysis simply describes the data you have, providing a raw digest. Predictive analysis looks for trends and ways to extrapolate what the data says about the future. Decision analysis builds on previous layers, taking into account external factors and conditions to provide recommendations about the best course of action.

The goal is clean, high quality data that gives you the whole accurate picture. You’ll be able to see performance benchmarks and manage processes for maximum efficiency. You can simplify, consolidate, prioritize and remove the frustration that comes from just reacting to situations. You will have access detailed information to define goals, create plans and make strategic decisions. With fewer limitations and increased flexibility you’ll be able to budget and forecast with more confidence. Business intelligence empowers you to focus on solutions which increase performance and decrease expenditures.

Without a data management service, much of your time may be eaten up preparing and securing the data instead of analyzing it. ZapBI offers visualizations which are customized for your industry and dashboards tailored to specific user roles. With the right tools and the right collaboration, BI will allow you to centralize, analyze and capitalize on your data in unprecedented ways.