13 Business Intelligence & Analytics Examples For New Insights

Digital data, by its very nature, paints a clear, concise, and panoramic picture of a number of vital areas of business performance, offering a window of insight that often leads to creating an enhanced business intelligence strategy and, ultimately, an ongoing commercial success.

Business intelligence steps up into this process by creating a comprehensive perspective of data, enabling teams to generate actionable insights on their own. With the introduction of online BI, companies today have the chance to create additional value, and, ultimately, profit.

At its core, business intelligence (BI) encompasses the strategies and technologies used by companies for the detailed online data analysis of key business-based information. BI technologies offer historical, current, and predictive insights into various aspects of business operations, thus helping a company to make informed decisions on activities centered around finances, marketing, sales, competitor research, social outreach, internal processes and more.

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Business intelligence is vital in our digitally-driven world as it essentially gives you an additional sense: a commercial vision that can help you see and process far more than the information that presents itself on the surface. And there are business intelligence examples and insights out there that demonstrate that every notion.

To put the power of business intelligence into perspective, here are 4 key insights you should know:

• Businesses using analytics are five times more likely to make better, quicker decisions, according to an article published on BetterBuys.
• Forecasts for the worldwide business intelilgence software applications market for 2024 are 17.6 billion, increasing from 14.9 billion in 2019.
• Businesses will create and manage 60% of the world’s data by 2025.
• 85% of business leaders believe that big data will change the way they do business, significantly, especially in the personalization potential of intelligence.

It’s clear that BI and the tools that facilitate better business intelligence are vital to the future of any company competing in the digital arena, regardless of industry or sector.

Here we explore 13 BI examples based on real-life case studies, scenarios, data, and discoveries. These business intelligence examples will showcase the power and potential of big data analytics in the modern age and how it can make your venture smarter, stronger, more scalable and more successful.

Without further ado, here are 13 inspirational examples of business intelligence.

1) Improving The Decision-Making Process

One of the primary benefits of BI is the ability to make better and more valuable decisions, and this business intelligence example is based on that very idea.

In the first of our business analytics examples, the CEO and founder of a budding fintech company was presented with the challenge of changing his business’s internal culture with a view to making all business data more accessible across the board.

To avoid the IT department having sole control over the data, and thereby preventing other departments from working collaboratively and making informed decisions that benefit the business, the company’s CEO deployed a dashboard reporting software for an automated data reporting process. As a direct result of this decision, not only is the company’s data now decentralized and digestible, improving the decision-making process across the board, but it has also saved 40 valuable hours per week on report preparation. This is one of our business insights examples that don’t stop here.

Speaking on this BI triumph, the fintech CEO said, “All departments now can access their own real-time dashboards, no matter if they are in the office or at a meeting. All decision-makers have quick, easy access to ad-hoc analysis and reports, even on their tablets.”

2) Uncovering Fresh Business Insights

The second of our business analytics examples is focused on discovering new business insights that can ultimately help streamline commercial processes, thereby improving productivity and boosting the bottom line.

A forward-thinking online food ordering business wanted to gain a better insight into the life cycles of its customers while gaining the ability to optimize sales reports and marketing campaigns in a time-efficient, cost-saving, and autonomous way.

By gaining self-service access to real-time analytical information the company was able to streamline its marketing and sales activities, make better, swifter decisions based on real-time information and uncover fresh insights that have served to improve its level of customer experience, resulting in increased brand loyalty.

The use of a real-time dashboard has empowered the budding online food giant to monitor all significant business operations through customized KPIs. Moreover, the new business analytics platform has made the business more able to rise to challenges as they unfold in days, rather than weeks or even months later. With the help of sales graphs and charts, the data was easily interacted with, and presented on a single screen.

This is one of our examples of business analytics that demonstrates how quickly the power of business intelligence affects the decision-making processes and creates a backbone for sustainable growth.

3) Boosting Productivity

Today’s consumers crave ratings, opinions, and reviews from their peers to help them make decisions, particularly when it comes to travel. That said, a travel-based rating business should be able to deliver an exemplary level of customer experience and support to its users.

In the third of our business intelligence examples, a hotel rating company based in Berlin turned to business intelligence analytics software as its data was fragmented, diluting its impact across the company, impairing its productivity and service levels as a result.

By rolling out a SaaS-based analytics solution that requires minimal IT intervention and making it accessible across the organization, the travel company was able to consolidate its key data in one accessible space.

When it comes to big data examples in real life, this travel business made a wise BI-based move that resulted in improved internal efficiency, better interdepartmental cohesion, and the new level of insight has also enhanced the company’s level of customer support beyond the CEO’s wildest expectations.

4) Increasing Sales

Number 4 of our inspiring BI examples demonstrate that by using big data analytics to your advantage, you can increase your sales – which is one of the primary aims for all business worldwide. By taking advantage of well-established sales KPIs, each business can improve its bottom line. Let’s see this through one of our top examples of companies using business intelligence.

A rising online retail player was suffering from an inconsistent and somewhat erratic sales performance for some time and was unable to evolve its strategy despite a host of efforts.

After turning to BI methodologies and incorporating a sales dashboard to solve this ongoing issue, it became apparent, almost immediately, that force rather than data drove the company’s sales strategy. By realigning its strategy and drilling down into the data available at its fingertips, the company’s sales grew by 24% while rep attrition fell by 90%. A better organized target-setting process, as well as streamlined sales strategies driven by data, has ensured that the company not only continues to scale, but its sales team continues to surpass its targets.

5) Improving Financial Efficiency

Without a doubt, your financial department is one of the beating hearts of your organization because, without steady cash flow and the capital to invest back into the business, the entire operation would grind to halt.

That said, the fifth of our business analytics examples focuses on evolving a company’s business intelligence to identify potential cash flow issues and improve financial efficiency. In this scenario, a disease diagnostics brand turned to an online reporting software and business intelligence methodologies as, despite a period of rapid growth, the company’s percentage collections were low, and accounts receivables, as well as claim denials, had reached a record high.

To tackle this potentially devastating issue, the company implemented an intuitive financial reporting system that allowed them to drill down into a wealth of relevant account-based metrics but also utilizing a wealth of financial graphs that helped them see data in a visual and straightforward way.

As a result of this savvy BI initiative, and the most financially-driven of our examples of business intelligence, the business diagnostics was able to, well, diagnose the issues by leveraging the power of financial reports, uncovering the source of the claim denials, and recovering millions of dollars’ worth of claims in the process.

6) Streaming Internal Processes

A rapidly growing US-based healthcare company suffering from a raft of disjointed internal processes and commercial inefficiencies sought the power of BI in the sixth of our analytics examples.

Due to a lack of cross-departmental compatibility arisen out of poor data handling, collection, and analytics processes, the business was unable to use this wealth of digital insight to its advantage. However, by working with a BI partner to develop and deploy a unified business intelligence system that integrates multiple data sources into one single platform, the healthcare company was able to analyze their data in on an efficient, valuable and accessible format, empowering it to make increasingly smart decision to benefit the business. This is one of our business insights examples that shows us how healthcare companies can perform on a much higher level.

Armed with the tools required to perform their jobs better, departments including finance, billing, marketing, and sales began to work more productively, evolving internal processes, and boosting cross-departmental collaboration.

This scenario is perhaps one of the most valuable of our business analytics examples as it serves to showcase how big data in healthcare and business intelligence can help foster a culture of continual evolution, which is an invaluable asset in today’s fast-paced digital world.

Your Chance: Get started with Business Intelligence analytics today!
Try our BI software 14-days for free & benefit from powerful analytics.

Try our BI software 14-days for free & benefit from powerful analytics.

7) Saving Marketing Dollars

One of our industry BI solutions examples focuses solely on the marketing department of a company. A US-based e-commerce company suffered from low conversion rates, despite the fact their campaigns were monitored on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis with the help of traditional spreadsheets. The team was disparate across 19 US cities, and their communication was oftentimes slow. By the time the campaign manager analyzed the campaign data, another campaign already needed to be launched. This blind approach to their promotional activities cost them days and weeks of proper planning, analyses, and reporting process. Losing time in marketing is a significant issue that costs dollars, and, ultimately, conversions.

A centralized BI solution saved the team 4 working days per week by automating the reporting processes, alarming the designated campaign manager when an anomaly in the campaign occurred, and predicting future campaign results.

They utilized a similar marketing dashboard such as this one:

**click to enlarge**

This example of business intelligence shows the top 3 campaigns by spent budget, the total number of impressions, clicks, acquisitions, and the CPA by a campaign for the last 12 weeks. The whole team had this dashboard automatically delivered and updated in their inbox each week – insights were made fast, campaigns were planned better, and campaign managers across the US had the same data at the same time so their communication and cohesion also improved.

8) Reducing IT Involvement

A financial company was having difficulties in their analytical processes involving the IT department. Their daily analytical and ad hoc reports were often times late, and employees didn’t have a proper insight into the massive amounts of data they were collecting. The IT department was simply overburdened with requests from each department of the company, and when you add the additional tasks they needed to handle, they were overpowered with a shortage of time and efficiency.

The company wanted to decentralize the decision-making process, and grant business users across the company the possibility to extract, administer, and derive insights while creating their own reports, without the need to wait for the IT department for hours, even days. Since they needed to combine multiple data sources, internal and external, a business intelligence solution was a logical step forward for implementing into their operational and strategic management.

The company quickly saw an improvement of their reporting and analytical processes, not only via automated standard reports but also in ad hoc analysis, where they only needed to utilize a drag-and-drop interface to generate immediately actionable insights. The IT department could also resort to the database reporting tool since business intelligence provides beginner and advanced features for business users across industries and departments.

This is one of the business analytics examples that show how to unburden staff and create a working culture that saves time and increases productivity.

9) Connecting Departments

Another real-world business analytics example centers around a fashion label based in Washington, D.C. with multiple stores across the city.

Their challenges arose when they needed to combine sales and marketing data in real-time, optimize their promotional activities to deliver the best possible results, and create a comprehensive overview of the customer lifecycle. That meant that a vast amount of data and KPIs needed to be managed and successfully analyzed to get the best possible results.

They decided to implement business intelligence into their operations to be able to monitor real-time data, ensure employees have access to marketing and sales analytics and use a dashboard builder to visualize all their business information.

It not only improved customer loyalty (we will talk about this in another example of business intelligence), but by connecting various datasets from different departments, the company managed to utilize these business intelligence KPI tools for various purposes such as aligning promotional activities with the goal of closing more sales deals. Ultimately, the sales department was better informed about marketing activities, and the marketing department could better plan their promotions to fit the overall customer lifecycle.

Your Chance: Get started with Business Intelligence analytics today!
Try our BI software 14-days for free & benefit from powerful analytics.

Try our BI software 14-days for free & benefit from powerful analytics.

10) Increasing Employee Performance

We continue with examples of companies using business intelligence by mentioning an HR department of a US-based company that was experiencing issues when employees started to increase their overtime hours, the productivity decreased, but the number of sick days steadily grew. This was an unusual situation in HR since it showed them that there are issues with the workforce, but they couldn’t afford the time to speak with each employee, it would have taken them weeks of time, even months.

The manager decided to take advantage of HR analytics software and utilize business intelligence for their department. By analyzing workforce behavior and performance, the department had a better overview of the issues that needed to be solved.

The most prominent HR KPIs that were looked upon are the overall labor effectiveness, overtime hours, absenteeism rate, and the training costs to see if new hires would make sense. After looking at the data on interactive visualizations that gathered historical and present information of the whole department, the manager could clearly conclude that the department was understaffed, chronically tired, and the company needs new hires or the sick days will increase exponentially, thus creating substantial business issues in the long run.

This is one of our operational business intelligence examples that showed us how workforce management can be streamlined and upscaled so that the whole company doesn’t deteriorate because the staff simply needs more help.

They used an HR dashboard similar to this example below:

**click to enlarge**

This enabled them to advance their employee productivity and the overall performance since the analytics process empowered the manager to make a better-informed decision and create regular HR reports that provide accurate data. And it didn’t take weeks or months to do it, visualizations were generated with a few clicks.

Now we will focus on examples of business analytics that improved a manufacturing business located in France.

11) Enhancing Manufacturing Processes

A plethora of data is managed in the manufacturing industry, and when you add the increased use of robotics and artificial intelligence, this industry is one of the pioneers when it comes to utilizing business intelligence.

The issues this particular German-based company was facing were related to streamlining their production process since they started to experience more problems with their equipment so the production volume decreased, and business concerns started to arise.

By having a birds-eye view of all the manufacturing analytics needed to successfully operate the production process, the company managed to make the most out of intelligent data alerts that enabled the production workers to be immediately alarmed when an anomaly would occur. This ensured that no machinery is out of order any more as their repairs and management could go under immediate inspection, even before the actual breakdown occurred, the production process stopped, and enormous amounts of revenue lost.

This is one of our real-world business analytics examples that puts a spotlight on artificial intelligence, and how it improves the maintenance of production facilities that need the lowest production downtime possible, one of the most important manufacturing KPIs, alongside with the production volume and costs.

Now we will take a look at our next business intelligence solutions examples focused on retail and a web-based electronics supplier.

12) Improving Customer Loyalty

In number 12 of our business analytics examples, a clothing retailer in the early stages of its rising success was struggling to scale its business further. After a year of impressive growth, the business saw its profits and customer acquisition levels plateau while seeing a rise in customer churn. The company was able to maintain its momentum so it decided external help was needed for continued success.

By opting for a retail dashboard customized to display a host of invaluable demographic data about its existing users and target audience and with retail KPIs focused on increasing customer value and new customer acquisition, the company began to grow its audience once again.

The business was able to identify its strengths and weaknesses, spot emerging trends, and segment its audience accurately to ensure it offered the right personalized deals or offers to the right set of consumers, resulting in significant growth in its customer base and increased brand loyalty.

13) Optimizing Inventory

The thirteenth and final of our operational business intelligence examples, or business analytics examples, is centered on stock or inventory optimization. Around 46% of SMBs either don’t track their inventory or use a laborious manual method to do so, costing time, money, and a host of other valuable resources.

A tight-knit web-based electronics supplier that deals with a large warehouse of ever-changing stock began to feel the effects of a poor inventory management process when it began to lose track of high-value items and ensure an increasing number of in-house damages.

Before the situation spiraled out of control, the company adopted a decision support system (DSS) so it could use all of its inventory-based data to make informed choices regarding the way it stored, quantified, and managed its stock on a sustainable basis. This exhaustive and incredibly smart analysis of historical data in addition to stock-taking metrics for warehouse product not only helped the business to keep track of its various items, but it also prevented damages and ensured all of its popular products remained stocked at all times.

Your Chance: Get started with Business Intelligence analytics today!
Try our BI software 14-days for free & benefit from powerful analytics.

Try our BI software 14-days for free & benefit from powerful analytics.

We live in an age rich in data, and those that use it wisely today will reap endless rewards tomorrow, and beyond. These examples of business analytics prove that BI is no longer a process used solely by specific industries, but its implementation is welcomed and successfully employed by managers, employees, average business users, and IT specialists who want to work with a seamless SQL report builder and build their analysis with this popular language.

We hope that these BI examples have inspired you to improve your organization’s processes and for further reading, explore these 10 essential data visualization techniques.

To summarize our subject matter, here are the most prominent business intelligence examples that businesses use for:

1) Improving The Decision-Making Process

2) Uncovering Fresh Business Insights

3) Boosting Productivity

4) Increasing Sales

5) Improving Financial Efficiency

6) Streaming Internal Processes

7) Saving Marketing Dollars

8) Reducing IT Involvement

9) Connecting Departments

10) Increasing Employee Performance

11) Enhancing Manufacturing Processes

12) Improving Customer Loyalty

13) Optimizing Inventory

If you want to be a part of your own business intelligence story, you can try our online data visualization software for a 14-day trial, completely free!