Successful Business Intelligence Examples – NIX United

How does business intelligence (BI) help entrepreneurs shape up their corporate environment and achieve their goals? The idea of business intelligence is quite simple: it allows different kinds of corporate experts to process data more effectively and make better decisions about the development of their businesses. Making smart decisions helps organizations to not just improve their functional activities but also determine ineffectual processes, increase revenue, and obtain substantial advantages over the competitors on the market. Exploring the values of various examples of business intelligence systems helps you objectively estimate the importance of BI software for your company’s development.

Business intelligence encompasses a set of instruments and technologies for collecting, analyzing, and processing data. For instance, agencies that perform application submitting use several channels and they need to gather generalized statistics of sales. Or there’s an advertising campaign that is conveyed on several different platforms and it’s necessary to compare the effectiveness of every platform. BI helps to configure all these processes.

By utilizing business intelligence software it is possible to transform raw data collected from different sources into comprehensive and actionable analytics. There are numerous examples of business intelligence software like Microsoft Power BI, SAP Business Projects, Looker, Tableau, Qlik Sense, and many others. Companies in any industry or sphere can utilize BI solutions on a corporate level as well as in particular branches and for certain products or services. 

The Principles of BI Systems Work and Usage

Business intelligence systems provide a wide range of analytical data which can be effectively used for building proper business development strategies. The user side of any BI software solution is intuitively designed and doesn’t demand any serious technical knowledge for successful usage. It is required to connect the system with data sources, furthermore, the data moves to the warehouse for data mining, and gets converted into ready-made analytical reports.

As for the data sources, these can be cloud storage like Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and others, documents like Excel, PDF, XML, etc., and various SQL-based systems.

Behind the seemingly simple analyzing process stand complicated data mining processes and analytics preparation. Different business intelligence examples offer quite the same feature list. BI solutions include:

  • Instruments of data integration and extraction (ETL): ETL instruments extract the data from external source systems, transform it, clean, and upload to one consolidated warehouse
  • Analytical data storage: the database, which structures and analyzes data
  • Data analysis: complete, all-encompassing data analysis is possible due to the usage of OLAP instruments that enable estimating various data points of view and determining trends and dependencies
  • Data visualization tools: in order to present the data process results there are informational dashboards that display the analysis results with specialized indicators

A good business intelligence application example at a company is working with data analytics in such departments as finance, marketing, sales, and operations departments. Different experts can apply BI systems in order to reach different goals:

  1. Finance. With the help of BI tools, it is possible to track the financial activity of the company and estimate the company’s market and credit risks and how potentially the chosen strategy may influence profits
  2. Marketing. Utilizing different business intelligence examples, marketers keep real-time campaign tracking, assess each performance scenario, and plan future campaigns. Marketing specialists get an all-encompassing evaluation of the company’s overall performance and enable them to share their comprehensive vision in terms of data analysis across other company departments
  3. Sales. The specialists involved in the sales and operations work closely with BI dashboards and KPI stats to receive timely access to such information as customer lifetime value, customer profitability, and others
  4. Operations. To ensure that the company doesn’t waste resources like time and money on inefficient operation performances, operation managers use BI solutions to collect and analyze relevant data
  5. Data analysts. Companies have specialized data analysis departments in which specialists use corporate company data together with different analytics services to determine business improvement opportunities and share their recommendations with company leadership.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

The main benefit of utilizing business intelligence is certainly its ability to generate actionable insights that result in data-driven decisions. Some other business intelligence success stories point out reconsidering the performance of particular products or services provided, which helps to save tremendous amounts of resources. However, there’s a whole list of the benefits for organizations guaranteed by applying BI:

  • Decision-making sped up. When entrepreneurs have concise and relevant data-driven analytics prepared, making decisions about the company’s performance strategy becomes easier and faster
  • Using data for a better understanding of business performance. With the help of modern BI system examples, organizations can clearly understand what happened, why it happened, and what should happen to ensure optimization of their operations.
  • KPI response. Thanks to this,t data are analyzed from various points of view and companies can work out actionable takeaways depending on every case.
  • Comprehensive data visualization. Viewing data on interactive dashboards with user-friendly interfaces helps to receive a better understanding of the demonstrated insights.
  • Connecting different company departments. Different company departments from finance and sales for support and customer care receive data-driven improvement suggestions.
  • All-size company decisions. Modern business intelligence solutions allow spreading particular data or whole data analysis between many users of one organization
  • Proper analytical insights. BI enables analysis of a wide range of data in order to ensure that the chosen company’s strategy is up-to-date. 
  • Competition is nailed. Business intelligence enables competitive analysis that reveals market features and competitors’ businesses advantages and disadvantages
  • Multi-platform solution. Cutting-edge business intelligence software is available in the web and mobile versions. Thus, more information is distributed faster to a bigger number of users.
  • Cost-saving insights. Business intelligence systems analyze the raw data in such a way so that they can determine the optimal opportunities directed at cutting corporate costs. BI solutions help to save funds on human resources, marketing, inventory, excessive vendors, etc.
  • Profit increasing. Companies increase their profits by utilizing business intelligence insights that describe budget discrepancies or inefficiencies.
  • Employee satisfaction. BI systems help to analyze data that covers topics of team effectiveness. Using ready-made business intelligence reports, it estimates the productivity of the whole team as well as of a particular department team or particular team member.
  • Customer care improvement. BI reports help to determine whether companies’ customers are satisfied with the available product line or range of services offered. The reports also inform entrepreneurs about the customer behavior, build up images of users’ personas, and, using real-time data, estimate client feedback in order to add necessary corrections to improve customer service.

Real-World Business Intelligence Success Stories

Enterprises around the globe confirm the effectiveness of leveraging BI systems in their work and increasing revenue thanks to data-based decision making. Big or small, companies have to constantly deal with growing customer demands, tough competition, and often narrow profit margins. However, there are bright BI examples that prove that a data-driven approach in building a smart strategy guarantees better results.

Real-world business intelligence examples presuppose serving the necessary business needs of the company. For quite a long time, it was a common practice only for big enterprises to utilize BI systems for managing all their processes and operations. Nowadays, big companies require smart data analysis even more, and medium and small-size companies that are data-centric tend toward rapid growth. In every case, the procedure includes collecting, storing, and analyzing the data from various enterprise operations and activities to streamline and optimize performance.

Find out how companies that use business intelligence benefited from increased revenue, longer customer lifecycles and retention, effective staff management, and many more:

  1. Amazon. Let’s start with a giant—it is well-known that Amazon is a retail giant with more than 100 million prime customers worldwide and over 12 million products for sale. The global marketplace is all about concentrating huge amounts of data that should be processed quickly and effectively to ensure all personalized user recommendations, targeted marketing, and pricing optimizations are up-to-date. All these analytic efforts result in the extended collection of various metrics about every customer and help to bring the user experience to such a new, high-quality level that makes Amazon a leading e-retailer in the US. Amazon uses BI systems to optimize its logistics and streamline the workflow of the supply chain. Utilizing modern BI tools, Amazon speeds up orders deliveries thanks to predictive analysis, choosing the best shipping schedules, routes, and groupings of products. 
  2. Coca-Cola Bottling Company (CCBC). This company used to have trouble with lots of manual reports preparations. The Coca-Cola data analysts team had to bring together the reports of the workflows and various metrics from more than 200 million lines of data collected from 100 different systems into the corporate data warehouse. All that work was needed for preparing a single data analysis dashboard. After they started applying cutting-edge BI technologies, they managed to streamline data analysis and report processes. The Coca-Cola leadership can get free and easy access to the earned analytical reports every morning, while the data analysts team can concentrate on different tasks. Thus, introducing modern business intelligence examples to data analysis processes helped the CCBCC team to optimize their workflow and improve total team performance.
  3. American Express. Reliable data analysis is one of the essential instruments of any financial organization. American Express has adopted strong BI solutions to create new payment methods and market offers to users. Preventing fraudulent transactions, adhering to AML compliance, and excellent customer retention are all results of implementing efficient BI software for gathering and analyzing the data. AmEx is such a business intelligence use case that managed to also benefit from using BI and greatly optimized their customer acquisition and eventually streamlined all customers’ actions online. 
  4. Starbucks. As Starbucks has a unique success story itself, the business intelligence services the company applies also have a striking difference compared to competitors. The Starbucks Loyalty Card program driven by advanced BI software allows the collection of terabytes of individualized purchase data on its seven-figure client audience. Based on the received data analysis, this coffee giant easily predicts individual preferences and offers for a particular customer. Thus, Starbucks customers regularly receive information about the offers they can be potentially interested in which helps the company maintain strong customer retention. Starbucks’ story belongs in the list of business intelligence success stories that end with consistent revenue and popularity growth. This strategy eventually leads to a dramatic increase in revenue and the growth of the trust inside the users’ community. 
  5. REI. With huge amounts of transactions, both online and in-store, operations management, customer demographics, and many more, REI has to face the challenge of dealing with more than 90 terabytes of data. In order to ensure providing a more personalized client experience, REI applied smart and effective business intelligence solutions that enabled faster collecting and estimating of key customer insights. By constantly monitoring such metrics as customer lifetime value, outflow and retention rates, price per item, items per order, etc., this large outdoor retailer gets an all-encompassing image of every user. Based on the earned data analysis, the company manages to build advantageous strategies without wasting its time and money on useless solutions. 

How to Improve Your Business Intelligence to Make Your Company Prosper

Adopting business intelligence examples can be overwhelming and take lots of time to streamline all the cycles included in the procedure. However, leveraging BI solutions for business growth will inevitably turn out to be a brilliant idea once a company starts receiving higher income and higher retention rates. Struggling with setting up a BI campaign just right to reach business goals will get easier with taking these steps:

  • Getting to know the business intelligence system. When starting dealing with any BI system it is necessary to take time and learn what this system can actually do in terms of planning, executing, and analyzing the data.
  • Working with the data. Before submitting tons of data to the BI system, it is necessary to learn the data’s features and peculiarities, where it is taken from, and what benefits can this data analysis bring to the decision-making processes.
  • Prioritizing the BI reports. Some business intelligence reports can simply not work for a particular business or particular goal-reaching. To get the most out of the data analysis, it is important to determine the goals of the analysis itself.
  • Sharing access to information with the employees. All employees, involved in some way or another in data analysis, should have access to all the data needed for business intelligence projects.

Conclusion

Finding the right tool for solving your BI tasks will dramatically improve your data analysis performance. NIX United provides companies with a robust and all-encompassing business intelligence system that helps to measure the enormous amount of data and create useful forecasts based on your discoveries and analysis. Enrich your data processing and decision-making with the vanguard software solutions that are completely customized and aimed at helping enterprises to achieve their boldest business goals.

BI Services