What is business intelligence and why do I need it?

What is business intelligence? Put in the simplest of terms Business Intelligence (BI) is a way of making sense of the data your organisation collects, turning into actionable information.

Business Intelligence usually depends on specialised BI software to aggregate data, often presenting it in a graphical format.

Why do I need business intelligence?

Business Intelligence comes into its own when your goals are business transformation or simplification. These goals become achievable when management teams have information that reveals patterns such as entrenched or emerging trends. BI makes it practical to present essential business information and day predictive models in an easy to understand graphic format, which then enables the types of discussions which lead to creative ways to transform and streamline businesses. BI can also improve inventory management, cash flow and profitability.

What should I look for in Business Intelligence software?

The new wave of artificial intelligence in software design is allowing people and organisations to build intuitive and powerful predictive business modelling. However, this is all meaningless unless your team feel comfortable and enjoy using your new BI software. Without using a solution, that goal may seem unobtainable, but it is not. If you are like most organisations, your team are big Excel users. If this is the case, then finding a Business Intelligence software solution that seamlessly integrates with Excel is an excellent place to start. 

Introducing Board BI

If you know how to use Excel, then you will feel at home with the business rules used by Board BI, which are written in Excel language. You can also use the spreadsheet models you already have to build your models in Board. 

Once you import these sheets, they can be dynamically linked to your original templates, ensuring consistency if you update either your Board models or the original Excel document.

Simplicity

When your team starts to use Board BI, they might be a little surprised at its simplicity. Boards drag-and-drop functionality is intuitive and fast, allowing your team to start building powerful models quickly. 

Board is elegantly simple to use and handles complex models almost better than any other BI software solution. Where many Business Intelligence software solutions stop, Board BI allows you to keep drilling down into your data revealing long-hidden secrets.

Dashboards

Board BI provides your team with the flexibility of creating the dashboards that are meaningful to them and sharing data with other team members. The data visualisation used by Board uses the human brains capacity to process visual data faster than written content, improving comprehension and revealing relationships and patterns in your business.

Boards data visualisation makes it possible to capture complex information on your business and market conditions in a brief series or single graphic. This is ideal for busy business executives who have little time to review complex data that reveals problems or pending initiatives.

Interacting with data

'What if' models created within Board BI are a great way of testing entrenched beliefs about everything from stock levels to sales. These models and others you create in Board BI can have a transformative impact on how you, your team and your customers view your business.

More

The right Business Intelligence software can be the bridge between where your business is today and where you want it to be. What we have touched on in this article is a brief insight into the power of Board Business Intelligence. If you would like a meaningful discussion on how you and your team could use Board BI to transform and simplify your business,

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