In the contemporary data-driven world, businesses are bombarded with information overload. Since data is the core of every business decision, enterprises are seeking ways to make sense of their data in order to guide their business strategies. One of the efficient solutions to this challenge is to adopt a Business Intelligence (BI) strategy. This blog delves into the importance of BI and different business intelligence tools and techniques.
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
In simpler terms, BI refers to technologies, tools, and practices that collect, integrate, analyze, and present critical business information. An enterprise can leverage BI process when it can access a holistic view of organization data and use it for better decision-making, derive change, and quickly adapt to the changing customer needs.
For example, a supply chain management company can efficiently manage its operations by using a BI tool. It can help the business identify at which stage delays are occurring and where irregularities within the shipping process exist. It can help provide insights to understand which products are usually delayed or which transportation company is frequently involved in delays.
Why is Business Intelligence Important?
BI is considered an indispensable asset for any business. Some of the reasons why modern organizations want to invest in a BI strategy are:
Smarter Decision Making
Since raw data barely provide any useful information, implementing BI systems helps turn unstructured business data into analyzable, meaningful insights, which in turn, facilitate better, timely decision-making.
In-depth Customer Insight
BI improves consumer knowledge, as it allows a business to identify consumption patterns to get ahead of the market trends. Consequently, an in-depth consumer insight also enables a business to quickly adapt to the changing market needs and plan its strategy, manufacturing, and budgeting accordingly.
Increase Business Efficiency and Productivity
BI systems can be used to share critical information across different business functions. Furthermore, it also saves valuable time by analyzing, interpreting, and reporting data in a timely manner and more efficiently. It hastens the data-t0-insight journey and free-up critical business resources for other important tasks.
What Are Business Intelligence Tools?
Business intelligence software is typically designed to analyze, transform, and prepare data for reporting. BI tools use data that has been previously stored and which may or may not be stored in a data warehouse/data mart. Techniques and tools used in business intelligence enable users to transform raw data into legible information that enables businesses to make better decisions, which in turn allows for growth and increased revenue.
Astera Centerprise: Prepare Data for Business Intelligence
Astera Centerprise Data Integrator is an easy-to-use and robust data integration tool that allows you to perform ETL tasks, data quality and profiling, and integration. Centerprise seamlessly integrates with various data visualization and reporting tools to create a full-stack Business Intelligence process.
Astera Centerprise is a complete data integration solution that can be used as a standalone product or can be integrated with other Business intelligence tools such as prediction analysis and data visualization tools to achieve a complete data mining and analytics process. The solution provides decision-makers a scalable, powerful, robust platform that helps in many processes, including data extraction, data scrubbing, data warehousing, and data migration.
Some of the benefits of Centerprise include:
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- Support for complex hierarchical data
- Easy to use graphical interface
- Well-suited for business as well as technical users
- High-performance and scalable
- Built-in extensive set of data transformation features
- Data profiling