Explore Business Intelligence Solutions by Industry & Function

After providing examples from various business functions, it’s time to take a look at the application of BI in different industries. Monitoring real-time analytics, utilizing powerful features and predicting the future is no longer a task of a designated data scientist but of an average business user as well. Here we will cover how BI can be applied in various industries and present a business intelligence solutions case study for each.

1. Logistics

Logistics is one of the most complex industries that require constant data updates, accurate tracking of the supply chain and management of large-scale datasets that, often enough, need urgent attention. To make sure all the bits and pieces of the logistics sector function properly, you can utilize a logistics dashboard for tracking all your data and enabling you to derive insights within minutes. These dashboards, created with a powerful, yet simple, BI solution, will enable you to transform all your operations into a more effective one, and ensure development across the board:

Our dashboard example above is focused on transportation management in the logistics industry. Informing the right person at the right time about your shipping flows and ensure better operational and strategic performance. We can clearly see the main metrics spread across our business intelligence analytics dashboard solution for managing the fleet, deliveries, loading time and weight. These core metrics, visualized in interactive charts will minimize the possibilities for errors, keeping the dashboard updated in real-time, sharing with colleagues or stakeholders, automating many processes that were performed manually in this cutthroat industry. By utilizing a BI platform for managing all the elements of the logistics processes, productivity is well increased, complexities simplified, errors minimized, and full control of the organization established with just a few clicks.

2. Financial services

Revolved around numbers, the financial industry is certainly one of the most important for the economy of the world. There is no company that doesn’t need proper financial services and business intelligence enters the stage as the backbone of this rewarding but demanding industry. Everyone in the financial sector has the same goal – to make better financial decisions and capitalize on the company’s analytics. But to be able to do so, financial managers need to look outside the box. Static spreadsheets won’t give you the speed needed to increase productivity, nor they will give you access to real-time information or automated calculations.

A financial report as we present above has many answers to the ever-changing financial data management. This portfolio management dashboard gives an overview of the performance of your finances by showing metrics like the net worth for the entire year, the allocations divided by sectors and regions, as well as an overview of the performance of your holdings with its historic net flows. This allows you to perform detailed analysis to produce an informed strategy, find new investment opportunities, or spot any gaps that need fixing. Like this, you can optimize cash flows, control expenses, and increase revenues which leads to an enhanced enterprise planning and resource allocation.

3. Healthcare

The massive healthcare industry is not an exception when it comes to collecting enormous volumes of data. Each healthcare professional that deals with analytical data to improve the performance of the facility needs a sharp eye, agility in their data management approach and the help of modern software. Turning to BI systems solutions for healthcare will not only decrease patients’ waiting times, but optimize the quality of healthcare services across the facility. Scattered data between numerous departments can be easily consolidated into a unified healthcare dashboard, focused on important metrics crucial for optimal performance:

Our dashboard example above focuses on general hospital metrics such as the total number of patients, treatment costs, waiting time, and patients by division, among others. To successfully perform in this invaluable industry, a hospital manager must collect information that will enable him/her to optimize the operational and strategic activities of the facility at hand. Using BI to monitor performance, expenses, patient satisfaction and insights into the big picture of the hospital, will not only enhance the decision-making processes but prove to be an indispensable tool to form a healthy environment where health is needed the most. Clinical data doesn’t need to stay obsolete; evaluation of collected information doesn’t need to take a lot of time – with industry business intelligence, all important aspects of optimal hospital performance and high-quality treatments are covered.

4. Retail

Retail is an ever-changing industry that heavily relies on data to manage performance. Every retailer has the same goal: to increase sales and, ultimately, profits in order to stay competitive in this highly cutthroat environment. Modern business intelligence provides the right foundation to help retailers in their data management processes, ensuring updated information at any time so professionals can make fast but reliable and correct decisions. Business intelligence takes care of automation, visualization and analytics of your operations so you can have a clear visual representation of what’s going on and where, hence, you can focus on why and optimize your operations. A retail dashboard can fully support you in the process:

Focused on the most prominent retail store metrics such as sales by division and city, out of stock items and top 5 articles sold, you can easily adapt your retail management and ensure your customers have the best possible offers at all times. By having an overview of such important metrics, you can easily avoid getting out of stock, affecting your customer relations, and overall efficiency. Business intelligence will ensure your processes stay optimized and perform in the most effective way possible.

5. Manufacturing

Our business intelligence by industry rundown wouldn’t be complete without the manufacturing industry. Missing one essential information during a specific production stage can mean serious damages to the manufacturing company, where robust decision-making is a key element to successfully perform and outperform business goals and objectives. Many different parts need to work together perfectly to establish the best possible performance of the manufacturing sector, and BI can act as the prime source for structure and reliable solution to merge all relevant processes and eliminate any possible error. Through a manufacturing dashboard that consolidates important data through real-time analytics, has features such as immense interactivity and can predict what will happen in the future, manufacturing processes can easily be optimized and improved:

Products are the heart of any manufacturing company. Automating the monitoring of data completely eliminates manual analysis and calculations that can cause serious errors and affect the whole production process. Knowing the exact production volume, the quantity ordered, active and top-performing machines helps in identifying potential bottlenecks, and BI makes the analysis much easier and more effective. If you dig deeper into the reasons for returned items, you can set a clear strategy on what works best and how to avoid issues in the future. Industrial business intelligence doesn’t need to be complicated. With the right tools, organizations can make the most out of data, equipment, people, and business as a whole.

6. Digital Media

With the massive digitalization of content and the increase in mobile device usage in the last decades, the media industry has been forced to adapt to new challenges like the demand for free, online, and immediate content that was then covered in the papers or the news. But along with these challenges, the digital era has also presented an opportunity. Thanks to BI solutions media companies can access detailed information about their audience’s behaviors and preferences like they never could before. By performing detailed analysis of all the data in hand they can improve decision-making processes, assess audience’s feedback more accurately, evaluate any type of content they produce, and stay on top of all trends in the market.

The above image is a digital media dashboard including relevant metrics to track content quality control. Starting with the stay turnaround time that gives you an overview of each stage of the publication process, beginning in the writing stage and finishing with publication. By tracking this metric, you can be in full control of how every piece of content is going and find any bottlenecks that might be slowing down the process. For example, if an article is stuck in editing for more time than expected maybe you are producing too much content for only one editor to check. In addition, the dashboard includes KPIs to measure the success of your publications. You have the top 5 articles by likes, the average number of comments per article, and the subscribers gained. Like this, you can understand what type of content your audience engages the most with and optimize your production accordingly.

7. FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods)

The fast-moving consumer goods is another industry that has not been left unharmed with the advances of modern times. With more and more competition popping up every day, including big retailers and small sustainable businesses, FMCG companies have struggled to fight for brand awareness and to gain a place in new growing channels such as the e-commerce market. With such high competition, implementing business intelligence solutions can help FMCG managers to save money on inventory and supply costs as well as visualize patterns of consumers purchasing behaviors to give the best experience and products in this crowded market.

As we said, optimizing your supply chain costs is one of the prime benefits of using business intelligence services for the fast-moving consumer goods industry and this FMCG dashboard proves it. First, we see an overview of the inventory turnover, the average OOS rate, and the average OTIF rate based on a pre-set target. By looking at these you can easily understand if something is not reaching the expected target and fix any problems in time. Next, we see these three metrics more in detail where each of them is compared with other numbers that help drive more advanced conclusions about its performance. Finally, we see two KPIs that are really important for any FCGM company: the average time to sell in days and the products sold within freshness date. These metrics are important because the sales cycle time for this industry is often ruled by expiration dates or sanitary rules which means it needs to be monitored carefully and constantly.

8. Energy

Following our list of industries that can benefit from business intelligence solutions, we couldn’t leave out energy. There are many types of energies powering our everyday life. With such a massive and important industry, it is impossible to ignore the potential a good data management process could bring to an energy company. By using a BI solution, energy managers have the opportunity to supervise production costs, consumption, distribution, track environmental issues, predict changes in the market, and many more metrics that will lead to better decision making and long-term business success.

As we said before, energy companies are working in massive sectors powering the life of many people. For this reason, it is important to have a real-time overview of how everything is performing to keep the company running smoothly. The energy dashboard above displays an overview of the production of different plants. Starting with the sectors, you find metrics like consumption and sales, which allow you to understand which one is demanding more energy and prepare your production and delivery accordingly. In addition, the dashboard showcases two charts tracking energy sources and production costs of each. This is a piece of valuable information to track, especially considering the environmental effects of energy production and the increasing demand for renewable energy. Finally, we see an operational chart tracking the downtime of your facility by calculating the number of power cuts and their duration.

9. Market Research

Data is the backbone of any market research agency. With so much survey and investigation data to handle, the analysis process can become tedious and time-consuming. With the help of business intelligence services, market research agencies can analyze user data in real-time and get actionable insights, identify patterns and trends in the data, make customer-focused decisions, and perform advanced analysis with the help of technologies such as artificial intelligence. Pair with all of this, it can also prove useful for external purposes, as it will add extra value that will lead to an increase in customer satisfaction and revenues. After detailed research on a topic, comes the moment to present the results, and long PowerPoint presentations are not enough anymore. With the powerful interactive features of a BI software, market analysts can make their whole presentation in one screen with the possibility to filter the data and use only the metrics necessary to support each discussion.

We’ve already mention de power of an interactive market research dashboard vs. traditional means of presentations. Let us see it more in detail now. The above dashboard displays the analysis of a specific brand in its market and the public perception based on varied factors. Starting from the left side, we can see the sample information divided into age group, region, and gender. Here you can also filter the data and compare results with each one of these metrics alone. Next, we see a brand awareness chart based on two questions and the number of times a particular brand was mentioned in the answers. This is then paired with particular information about the studied brand D like the top 5 branding themes and the celebrities that are paired with it. This type of visualization tool allows you to see multiple questions at once and compare them with other stats to perform a complete and interactive discussion of the results.

10. Construction

It is known that construction companies have to deal with many touchpoints simultaneously such as finances, corporate needs, work schedules and deadlines, suppliers, productions, and many more. Making sure that everything runs smoothly and that all processes are done on time is not an easy task. For this reason, turning to a BI solution can be extremely beneficial for this type of industry. By correctly managing their data, construction companies can simplify their processes by connecting the data from all their touchpoints into one place, this way all those immense amounts of information can be turned into cost-efficient, sustainable, and actionable results.

The construction analytics dashboard above perfectly illustrates all aspects that need to be covered for effective project management. On the top, we see general information about the project such as its name, the client, the type of project, the status, and its start and end date. Next, we see different metrics tracking the progress of the project such as the completion percentage, the SPI to measure how close the project is to being completed compared to the schedule, and the CPI to track the amount of completed work for every unit of cost spent. Finally, the dashboard offers a chart for cost breakdown divided by type of cost, and a line chart covering the project’s work & budget development based on the work scheduled and performed along with the actual costs. This dashboard will allow you to increase planning quality as well as optimize your budget development.