Organizations have always relied on data to make strategic decisions. As far back as the 1960s, many organizations did the same, but it was always dependent on a lot of manual resources and effort. It is only in the recent past that data collection, sorting, analyzing, and reporting have become automated. Business Intelligence has played a significant role in this. A BI system consists of data gathering, storage, knowledge management, and analysis. The insights that arise out of these data sets help organizations meet their ambitious goals.
Business Intelligence Solutions by Industry or Function
Contrary to widespread belief, extensive data analysis applies to large IT and tech giants or large organizations. Implementing BI across the board has revolutionized how specific industries and departments function.
Healthcare
The Healthcare industry is among the fastest adopters of BI. Hospitals and medical institutes collect enormous amounts of data. Data scattered across various departments are easily consolidated into a unified dashboard, which focuses on predefined metrics for optimal performance. The healthcare industry is harnessing the power of big data analytics to make faster and better decisions enabling them to reduce treatment costs, improve patient care, and enhance output. BI systems help decrease patients' waiting times and optimize the quality of healthcare services across the facility.
These days, there are a lot of use cases specific to healthcare:
Treatment planning based on symptoms
Identifying patients who need follow-up care
Supply chain management
Staff planning basis patient volume
Marketing
Many businesses have moved online and market themselves mainly through social media platforms. With most marketing tools and customers’ existing online, marketing has become increasingly data-driven.
BI in marketing helps leverage customer data and then track and analyze key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, customer acquisition costs, website traffic, social media engagement, etc. BI tools help marketing teams understand their audience, find, or predict trends in customer behavior, measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts across all channels, and reveal insights on competitors.
Human Resources
HR has changed in the last decade. The HR team has access to a large amount and variety of data. Everything nowadays is automated, from the number of job applications, recruitment processes, and appraisals to workforce management. Data storage and reporting also help in retrieving performance.
With a single, personalized dashboard, the HR team can provide valuable support to management and employees alike. It helps them to perform at optimum capacity and support the organization at a strategic, tactical, and operational level. BI has empowered many organizations to take a data-driven approach to people management.
Customer Service
In a digital economy, customer service is as important as the product or the service. Maintaining a good customer service report is essential as it contributes to both customer retention and new customer acquisition. Implementing a business intelligence solution to optimize the customer service department is vital. It helps perform detailed analysis on essential aspects such as service team performance, call center metrics, and customer behavior. BI helps in collecting and managing vast amounts of customer service-related data like C-SAT data, customer surveys, and social listening.
Many organizations use various BI tools in call centers to display dashboards and report on efficiency in real-time. It also helps agents stay aligned as they can track their performance against the goals set for them.
Finance
Finance Business Intelligence helps evaluate past financial performance and scenario planning, making it easy for CFOs to derive strategic value from their organizations' economic activities. It also enables the finance team to determine and analyze profitability across product lines, sales channels, customer pools, and geographical regions. BI helps achieve traditional goals such as accounting, book-keeping, preparation of financial statements, etc., and forward-looking ones such as financial planning and forecasting, driving portfolio cash investments, and managing CAPEX investments.
Logistics
In the logistics sector, a large volume of data is generated from the multiple operations that are carried out every day that involve many parties, such as clients, freight forwarders, warehousing, transport, customs, ports, and administrations.
To make sure all this comes together, organizations utilize a logistics dashboard for tracking all the data that enables them to derive insights within minutes. The dashboard measures many vital metrics, such as fleet management, delivery, loading time, and weight. The benefits include planning security, cost transparency, process mapping, utilization rate overview, reduced labor costs, better inventory management, and customer interaction.
Manufacturing
Successful manufacturing depends on businesses constantly finding new ways to streamline their operations. BI tools help manufacturing firms by providing focused and actionable insights that help them continuously fine-tune the production line.
The benefits of manufacturing analytics are myriad:
Increase production yield and output
Reduce risks and costs associated with downtime or equipment failures
Better understanding the machine utilization and effectiveness
Create better demand forecasts for products
Efficient warehouse management
Organizations ahead in the journey of measuring and acting on the data gathered must start taking a more holistic approach to their business intelligence strategy as data velocity and variety continues to accelerate. A robust BI strategy is the way to go. It has the power to improve operations, increase revenue and gain a competitive edge. In the next blog, we will bring information about the top trends in BI that the world is talking about. Stay tuned!
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