Business intelligence (BI) provides data that helps companies make timely and informed
decisions. We explain how implementing BI software can give companies of any size a
competitive edge. Plus, we share examples of how some of the most tech savvy companies are
using BI.
What Is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business intelligence refers to the technology that enables businesses to organize, analyze
and contextualize business data from around the company. BI includes multiple tools and
techniques to transform raw data into meaningful and actionable information.
BI systems have four main parts:
- A data warehouse stores company information from a variety of sources in a centralized
and accessible location. - Business analytics or data management tools mine and analyze data in the data warehouse.
- Business performance management (BPM)
tools monitor and analyze progress towards business goals. - A user interface (usually an interactive dashboard with data visualization reporting
tools) provides quick access the information.
German market research firm Statista estimates the volume of data created worldwide by 2024
will be 149 zettabytes. This vast amount of data, or “big data,” has made business
intelligence systems relevant for companies that want to harness its
power for a competitive advantage. Many BI systems use artificial intelligence (AI)
and other capabilities as a part of business analytics.
Key Takeaways:
- Business intelligence offers a wide variety of tools and techniques to support reliable
and accurate decision-making. - The most successful companies use BI to make sense of ever-increasing amounts of data in
a fast and economical way. - BI-based, data-driven decision-making helps companies stay relevant and competitive.
Where Is BI Used?
Sales, marketing, finance and operations departments use business intelligence. Tasks include
quantitative analysis, measuring performance against business goals, gleaning customer
insights and sharing data to identify new opportunities.
Here are examples of how various teams and departments use business intelligence.
-
Data scientists and analysts:
Analysts are BI power users, and they use centralized company data paired with
powerful analytics tools to understand where opportunities for improvement exist and
what strategic recommendations to propose to company leadership. -
Finance:
By blending financial data with operations, marketing and sales data, users can pull
insights from which decisions can be acted upon and understand factors that impact
profit and loss. -
Marketing:
Business intelligence tools help marketers track campaign metrics from a central
digital space. BI systems can provide real-time campaign tracking, measure each
effort’s performance and plan for future campaigns. This data gives marketing
teams
more visibility into overall performance and provides contextual visuals for sharing
with the company. -
Sales:
Sales data analysts and operation managers often use BI dashboards and key
performance indicators (KPIs) for quick access to complex information like discount
analysis, customer profitability and customer lifetime value. Sales managers monitor
revenue targets, sales rep performance along with the status of the sales pipeline
using dashboards with reports and data visualizations. -
Operations:
To save time and resources, managers can access and analyze data like supply chain metrics to find ways to
optimize processes. Business intelligence can also ensure that service level
agreements are met and help improve distribution routes.
In a genuinely data-driven company, every department and employee can take advantage of
BI-generated insights.
What Is the Value of Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence’s highest value is its ability to support data-driven decisions. BI
transforms pools of raw data into useful information that informs decisions and leads to
actions that yield positive bottom-line impact.
BI systems drive decisions based on historical, current and potential future data.
-
Descriptive analytics:
These analytics reveal what has happened or is happening and are part of dashboards,
business reporting, data warehousing and scorecards. When managed well, you’ll
have
a better understanding of problem areas in your business and can find opportunities
to improve. -
Predictive analytics:
These advanced analytics use data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning
to help make projections of future events and assess the likelihood that something
will happen. -
Prescriptive analytics:
These analytics reveal why you should take a particular action. Prescriptive
analytics enable optimization, simulation, decision modeling and provide the best
possible analysis for business decisions and actions.
BI software gathers sales, production, financial and many other business data sources. Many
companies use industry data to benchmark performance against competitors.
The Benefits of Business Intelligence
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Visualization | Advanced interactive dashboard representations of data using simple user
interfaces offer the ability to visualize information in a graphical format to understand data more insightfully. |
| Connection | The ability to manage and meld access to various data sources provides a
360-degree view of your business and your company that is not possible in a siloed data environment. |
| Collaboration | Tools enable data-informed improvements in various business functions
like marketing, finance, sales, operations, finance, support, HR and customer care individually and together. |
| Multi-Platform, Multi-User | BI applications work online and in mobile environments. Tools improve
system performance so enterprises can distribute more information to targeted users faster. In multi-terabyte data warehouses, these tools provide excellent query performance. |
| Scalability | Many systems offer user scalability to support advanced reporting and
analysis. Dashboards and reports are available to many users, not just restricted to the organization’s data analysts or executives. |
| Speed and Competitive Edge | BI can perform faster reporting, analysis and planning because of access
to global data. The system’s analysis capabilities make it possible to react to market or other conditions quickly. |
| Trusted Data and Accuracy | Reports can be highly customized, and KPIs monitored using more than one
data source. Real-time generated reports offer relevant data, which helps organizations, and their employees make better decisions. These reports provide insights, access, accuracy, and relevance. |
| Analysis and Insights | BI processes vast amounts of data to forecast, budget, plan, and stay
current. Competitive analysis helps companies understand the competition and benchmark competitor performance. This business intelligence enables product and service differentiation. |
| Decision-Making Support | Companies gain a competitive edge when they can leverage the existing
data at the right time to make accurate decisions faster. |
| Efficiency and Productivity | A 360-degree view of all activities helps companies identify issues,
improve operations, increase sales, and in turn, increase revenue. |
| Customer Satisfaction | BI can help you identify what services or products you’re lacking and
improve customer satisfaction by making necessary changes. Reports help you understand customer behavior, develop user personas, and use real-time data on the customer’s feedback to make corrective changes and improve customer service and, therefore, satisfaction. |
| Employee Satisfaction | Using BI data, you can assess team members’ strengths and weaknesses and
assign relevant training modules to support success. BI tools can automatically recognize positive behavior while regularly tracking worker contributions and improvement. |
| Savings | BI insight into the corporation’s raw data will help decision-makers
analyze cost-saving opportunities like excess inventory, human resource redundancies, marketing overages, too many vendors or waste in facilities management. |
| Savings and Profitability | BI tools can analyze any discrepancies, inefficiencies, or errors. BI
helps to increase profit margins by providing insights that lead to future sales and guide where to spend future budgets. |
| Strategic and KPI Targeting | BI assists companies in gaining a competitive edge by helping them find
new opportunities and build smarter strategies. Use the data to identify market trends and help improve profit margins for the company. Reports based on tracking established KPIs ensure the enterprise stays on course to match or exceed goals. |
Business intelligence has many benefits and can be a useful tool to achieve positive outcomes
for your business.
Case Studies: Real-World Examples of Business Intelligence at Work
Fast, data-informed decision-making can drive success. High customer expectations, global
competition and narrow profit margins mean many organizations, regardless of size or sector,
look to BI for a competitive advantage.
What is an example of business intelligence? Using data to serve up personalized ads based on
browsing history, providing contextual KPI data access for all employees and centralizing
data from across the business into one digital ecosystem so processes can be more thoroughly
reviewed are all examples of business intelligence. Here are some case studies that show
some ways BI is making a difference for companies around the world:
-
Lotte.com: BI Increases Company Revenue
Lotte.com is the leading internet shopping mall in Korea with 13 million customers.
- Challenge: With more than 1 million site visitors daily,
company executives wanted to understand why customers abandon shopping carts. - Solution: The assistant general manager of the marketing
planning team implemented customer experience analytics, the first online
behavioral analysis system applied in Korea. The manager used the information to
understand customer behavior and implement targeted marketing and transform the
website. - Results: With the insights from the new BI analytics program,
there was an increase in customer loyalty after one year and an increase of $10
million in sales. The changes came from identifying the causes of shopping cart
abandonment, such as a long checkout process and unexpected delivery times and
remedying the situation.
- Challenge: With more than 1 million site visitors daily,
-
Cementos Argos: BI Improves Financial Efficiency
Cementos Argos is a cement company with operations in the U.S., Central and South
America and the Caribbean.- Challenge: The company looked for an overall competitive
advantage and a way to support better decision-making. - Solution: Cementos Argos created a dedicated business analytics
center. The company invested in experienced business analysts and data science
teams and used BI to leverage data. - Results: The company standardized the finance process and
applied big data to gain more in-depth insight into customer behavior which
yielded a higher profitability level.
- Challenge: The company looked for an overall competitive
-
Baylis & Harding: BI Provides Decision Making Process Support
Baylis & Harding is a wholesale distributor specializing in world-class
toiletries and gift sets found in major and independent resellers.- Challenge: The company needed to give managers and executives
greater visibility into financial, customer and sales data to make better
decisions and expand the business. - Solution: Managers and executives used business intelligence
tools to create standard and ad hoc reports. - Results: Company executives and managers now have instant
access to the business data they need to act proactively. They can create custom
dashboards with KPIs relevant to their areas of focus and share the goals and
performance details with their teams without having to request a custom report
from IT.
- Challenge: The company needed to give managers and executives
-
Sabre Airline Solutions: BI Accelerates Business Insights
Sabre Airline Solutions provides booking tools, revenue management, web and mobile
itinerary tools, as well as other technology, for airlines, hotels and other
companies in the travel industry.- Challenge: The travel industry is remarkably fast paced. And
Sabre’s clients needed advanced tools that could provide real-time data on
customer behavior and actions. - Solution: Sabre developed an enterprise travel data warehouse
(ETDW) to hold its enormous amounts of data. Sabre executive dashboards provide
near real-time insights in user-friendly environments with a 360-degree overview
of business health, reservations, operational performance and ticketing. - Results: The scalable infrastructure, graphic user interface,
data aggregation and ability to work collaboratively have led to more revenue
and increased client satisfaction.
- Challenge: The travel industry is remarkably fast paced. And
-
Spear Education: BI Streamlines Internal Processes and Workflow
Spear Education is a leader in continuing education for dentists.
- Challenges: Spear’s phone system was lacking functionality that
could make its customer service reps work more efficiently and provide better
customer service. For example, their phone system didn’t record calls and
wasn’t
connected to a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. - Solution: After some research, Spear connected its call center
software with its BI solution to maintain more thorough customer interaction
records and provide a complete view of customer interactions. - Results: After implementing a new solution for their contact
center, Spear increased agent efficiency and saved the company 35 hours of rep
time per week. Spear’s agents now reinvest that time by placing 4,000 more
outbound calls every week.
- Challenges: Spear’s phone system was lacking functionality that
-
Univision: BI Increases Market Spend Efficiency
Univision is an American Spanish-language, free-to-air television network. It’s
the
largest provider of Spanish-language content in the country.- Challenge: Univision wanted more visibility into its data to
unify and focus on targeted ad campaigns. - Solution: Programmatic TV is an automated and data-driven
approach to buying and delivering ads against video content on television,
including ads served across the web, mobile devices and connected TVs, as well
as linear TV ads served across set-top boxes. With BI powered with information
from applications like Facebook, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, the
company can obtain more value from its programmatic advertising. - Results: Univision achieved an 80% growth in yield during the
first quarter after implementing business intelligence.
- Challenge: Univision wanted more visibility into its data to
-
New York Shipping Exchange: BI Reduces IT Dependency
New York Shipping Exchange (NYSHEX) is a shipping-technology company working to
improve the process of shipping overseas.- Challenge: To make sense of overall company performance, NYSHEX
would manually extract data from its proprietary application and various cloud
apps and then import it into Excel. This was a laborious process and few people
had access to the data, and most of the requests for reports fell on the
engineering team to execute. - Solution: NYSHEX invested in BI, centralized its data into one
system and gave the entire company access empowering those with no coding
knowledge to dive deep into analysis. - Results: Thanks to business intelligence and other efforts, in
2019, the company more than tripled its volume shipping between Asia and U.S.
- Challenge: To make sense of overall company performance, NYSHEX
-
Stitch Fix: BI Connects Departments, Data and Processes
Stitch Fix provides online personal clothing and accessory styling services. The
company uses recommendation algorithms and data science to personalize clothing
items based on size, budget and style.- Challenge: The company wants to reduce returns, keep repeat
customers and generate word-of-mouth business with recommendations from
customers to their friends and family. - Solution: Stitch Fix collects data within BI throughout the
buying process, meaning the more a customer shops with Stitch Fix, the better
the styling team comprehends their taste in clothing. The company hired
astrophysicists to decode the different personal style
components—intricate work
that would be impossible without the powerful analytics of BI. - Results: Using business intelligence to profile buyers and
their preferences, the company, which started in 2011, reported a customer base
of 3.4 million in 2020 and revenues of $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2020.
- Challenge: The company wants to reduce returns, keep repeat
-
SKF: BI Streamlines Manufacturing Processes
SKF is a Sweden-based global manufacturer and supplier of bearings, seals,
mechatronics and lubrication systems with 17,000 distributor locations.- Challenge: SKF’s broad geographic coverage and product
diversity required consistent market size and product demand forecasting to
adjust its manufacturing. The company needed to simplify the complex Excel files
used to produce a demand forecast. - Solution: Management realized it needed to implement a business
intelligence to serve as a single source of reliable information. Maintaining
the system is easier than trying to manage everything with Excel, and now
employees don’t have to rely on outdated spreadsheets and can access
simple-to-understand reports and dashboards. - Results: By centralizing data assets into a single system, SFK
was quickly able to share data and analyses between several departments —
including sales, manufacturing planning, application engineering, business
development and management. SKF now combines demand forecasts between
departments and has improved the planning process.
- Challenge: SKF’s broad geographic coverage and product
-
Expedia: BI Builds Customer Satisfaction
Expedia is the parent company of some top-tier travel companies, including Expedia,
Hotwire and TripAdvisor.- Challenge: Customer satisfaction is essential to the company’s
mission, strategy and success. The online experience should mirror a good trip
experience, but the company had no visibility into the voice of the customer. - Solution: The company had mountains of data they were manually
aggregating, leaving little time for analysis. Using business intelligence, the
customer satisfaction group was able to analyze customer data from across the
company and link results with 10 objectives related directly to corporate
initiatives. Owners of those KPIs build, manage and analyze data to discover
trends or patterns. - Results: The customer service team can see how well it is doing
against KPIs in real-time and take corrective steps if necessary. Plus, other
departments can use the data. For example, a travel manager can use BI to
discover high volumes of unused tickets or offline booking and create strategies
to adjust behavior and increase overall savings.
- Challenge: Customer satisfaction is essential to the company’s
Use Cases: Examples of Business Intelligence Strategies Prominent Companies Use
The most successful companies use BI to drive revenue, customer loyalty, operational
effectiveness, ad delivery, drive shareholder value, predict customer behavior and develop
new business opportunities.
Examples of How Leading Companies Use BI to Propel Their Success
What companies use business intelligence? From financial institutions like American Express
to social media giant Facebook and outdoor retailer REI, the most advanced and successful
companies in the world leverage BI. Here’s how some are using BI to power their
prosperity.
-
American Express:
Business intelligence is instrumental in the finance industry. American Express has
been using the technology to develop new payment service products and market offers
to customers. The company’s experiments in the Australian market have rendered it
capable of identifying up to 24% of all Australian users who will close their
accounts within four months. Using that information, American Express takes steps to
retain customers. BI also helps the company accurately detect fraud and protect
customers whose card data may be compromised. -
Chipotle Mexican Grill:
The restaurant chain has more than 2,400 restaurants worldwide. It implemented BI to
track operational effectiveness. Chipotle can now monitor every restaurant’s
operational efficiency and serve up detailed information in dashboards. By
standardizing the reporting and working from the same data ecosystem, Chipotle was
able to make uniform KPIs for benchmarking and sharing improvement and success
stories. That solution saves thousands of hours for the company.
-
Coca-Cola:
With 35 million Twitter followers and a whopping 105 million Facebook fans, Coca-Cola
benefits from its social media data. Using AI-powered image-recognition technology,
the company can tell when photographs of its drinks post online. This data, paired
with the power of BI, gives the company important insights into who is drinking
their beverages, where they are and why they mention the brand online. The
information helps serve consumers more targeted advertising, which is four times
more likely than a general ad to result in a click. -
Delta Airlines:
Big data and BI support customer service and differentiate the Delta experience.
Flight attendants now have the tools to personally thank and recognize valued
corporate travelers. Positive customer experience coupled with thoughtful programs
help position Delta as a leader in the business travel space. While any Delta
customer can receive personal recognition, the airline goes the extra mile to serve
corporate travelers and its medallion members. This enhancement provides more
opportunities to thank flyers and build customer loyalty. -
Ellie Mae:
The company processes 35% of U.S. mortgage applications. Record low-interest rates
created a high demand for loan processing. To make data more accessible for lenders,
Ellie Mae developed a hosted data warehouse model that allows lenders to analyze
data by connecting a BI application directly to their systems without replicating
the data to a local data warehouse. Capital market teammates can use that data to
navigate volatile markets, allowing them to provide excellent service and process
loans for their customers. -
Lowe’s:
The home improvement company uses business intelligence to merge what the customer
tells them with actual behavior occurring online and in the store. They use this
data to discover deeper insights that lead to better product assortment and staffing
at specific store locations. The process of data analysis drives sales and also
serves the customer. For instance, Lowe’s uses predictive analytics to load trucks
specific to individual zip codes, so the right store gets the right type and amount
of product. -
Netflix:
The online entertainment company’s 148 million subscribers give it a massive BI
advantage. How does Netflix use business intelligence? Netflix uses data in multiple
ways. One example is how the company formulates and validates original programming
ideas based on previously viewed programs. Netflix also uses business intelligence
to get people to engage with its content. The service is so good at targeted content
promotion that its recommendation system drives over 80% of streamed content. -
REI:
REI uses its business intelligence platform for customer segmentation analysis, which
helps inform decisions like member lifecycle management, shipping methods and
product category assortments. BI-based decisions also inform member acquisition
initiatives with detailed demographics on factors such as gender to personalize ads.
The insights from BI help determine everything from how to display content on the
website and how to segment email campaigns.
-
Starbucks:
Through its popular loyalty card program and mobile application, Starbucks owns
individual purchase data from millions of customers. Using this information and BI
tools, the company predicts purchases and sends individual offers of what customers
will likely prefer via their app and email. This system draws existing customers
into its stores more frequently and increases sales volumes. -
Tesla:
The innovative automotive company uses BI to connect their cars wirelessly to their
corporate offices to collect data for analysis. This approach links the carmaker to
the customer and anticipates and corrects problems such as component damage, traffic
or road hazard data. The result is a high customer satisfaction score and
better-informed decisions on future upgrades and products. -
Twitter:
The social media company deploys BI with AI to fight inappropriate and potentially
dangerous content on its platform. Algorithms rather than human users identify 95%
of suspended terrorism-related accounts.BI and AI also support fine-tuning to improve the overall user experience. Twitter
personnel and its business intelligence tools monitor live video feeds and
categorize them based on subject matter. They use this data to enhance search
capabilities, and help algorithms identify videos users might be interested in
viewing. -
Uber:
The company uses business intelligence to determine multiple core aspects of its
business. An example is surge pricing. Algorithms monitor traffic conditions,
journey times, driver availability and customer demand in real-time, meaning prices
adjust as demand rises and traffic conditions change. Dynamic pricing in real-time
action is akin to what airlines and hotel chains use to
adjust cost based on need. -
Walmart:
The retail behemoth uses BI to understand how online behavior influences online and
in-store activity. By analyzing simulations, Walmart can understand customer
purchasing patterns, for example, how many eyeglass exams and glasses are sold in a
single day, and pinpoint the busiest times during each day or month.
How to Improve Your Business Intelligence to Make Your Company a Leader
BI and tools like AI may seem complicated. However, current user interfaces are
straightforward and easy to use. So even smaller companies can take advantage of data to
make profitable and positive decisions.
Examples of Business Intelligence Tools and Techniques
What are examples of business intelligence tools? Predictive modeling, data mining and
contextual dashboards or KPIs are just some of the most common BI tools. Here are more tools
and how they’re used.
-
Analytics:
A BI technique that probes data to extract trends and insights from historical and
current findings to drive valuable data-driven decisions. -
Dashboards:
Interactive collections of role-relevant data are typically stocked with intuitive
data visualizations, KPIs, analytics metrics and other data points that play a role
in decision-making. -
Data mining:
This practice uses statistics, database systems and machine learning to uncover
patterns in large datasets. Data mining also requires pre-processing of data.
End-users use data mining to create models that reveal patterns. -
Extract Transfer Load (ETL):
This tool extracts data from data-sources, transforms it, cleans it in preparation
for reports and analysis and loads it into a data warehouse. -
Model visualization:
The model visualization technique transforms facts into charts, histograms and other
visuals to support correct insight interpretation. -
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP):
OLAP is a technique for solving analytical problems with multiple dimensions from
various perspectives. OLAP is useful for completing tasks such as performing CRM data analysis, financial forecasting and
budgets. -
Predictive modeling:
A BI technique that utilizes statistical methods to generate probabilities and trend
models. With this technique, predicting a value for specific data sets and
attributes using many statistical models is possible. -
Reporting:
Reporting involves gathering data using various tools and software to mine insights.
This tool provides observations and suggestions about trends to simplify
decision-making. -
Scorecards:
Visual tools, such as BI dashboards and scorecards, provide a quick and concise way
to measure KPIs and indicate how a company is progressing to meet its goals.
Examples of Business Intelligence Trends
BI is continually evolving and improving, but four trends – artificial intelligence,
cloud
analytics, collaborative BI and embedded BI – are changing how companies are using
expansive
data sets and making decisions far easier.
-
Artificial intelligence:
AI and machine learning emulate complex tasks executed by human brains. This
capability drives real-time data analysis and dashboard reporting. -
Cloud analytics:
BI applications in the cloud are replacing on-site installations. More businesses are
shifting to this technology to analyze data on demand and enrich decision-making. -
Embedded BI:
When BI software is integrated into another business application, it’s called
embedded BI or
embedded analytics. Some of the benefits of embedded BI include enhanced
reporting functionalities, and it’s been shown to improve sales and increase
customer retention.
Many companies look to cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) instead of on-premise
software to keep up with growing warehousing requirements and faster implementations. A
growing trend is the use of mobile BI to take advantage of the proliferation of mobile
devices.
Examples of Business Intelligence Software and Systems
BI software and systems provide options suited to specific business needs. They include
comprehensive platforms, data visualization, embedded software applications, location
intelligence software and self-service software built for non-tech users.
Here are some examples of the latest BI software and systems:
-
Business intelligence platforms:
These are comprehensive analytics tools that data analysts use to connect to data
warehouses or databases. The platforms require a certain level of coding or data
preparation knowledge. These solutions offer analysts the ability to manipulate data
to discover insights. Some options provide predictive analytics, big data analytics
and the ability to ingest unstructured data. -
Data visualization software:
Suited to track KPIs and other vital metrics, data visualization software allow users
to build dashboards to track company goals and metrics in real-time to see where to
make changes to achieve goals. Data visualization software accommodates multiple KPI
dashboards so that each team can set up their own. -
Embedded business intelligence software:
This software allows BI solutions to integrate within business process portals or
applications or portals. Embedded BI provides capabilities such as reporting,
interactive dashboards, data analysis, predictive analytics and more. -
Location intelligence software:
This BI software allows for insights based on spatial data and maps. Similarly, a
user can find patterns in sales or financial data with a BI platform; analysts can
use this software to determine the ideal location to open their next retail store,
warehouse or restaurant. -
Self-service business intelligence software:
Self-service business intelligence tools require no coding knowledge to take
advantage of business end-users. These solutions often provide prebuilt templates
for data queries and drag-and-drop functionality to build dashboards. Users like HR
managers, sales representatives and marketers use this product to make data-driven
decisions.
How NetSuite Improves and Increases the Value of BI for Your Organization
BI tools can have an enormous impact on your business. They can help you improve your
inventory control, better manage your supply chain, identify and remove bottlenecks in your
operations and automate routine tasks. But for BI tools to be most effective, you first have
to centralize data that’s stored in multiple disparate systems.
NetSuite business intelligence tools take
the data stored in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and provides built-in,
real-time dashboards with powerful reporting and analysis features. By centralizing data
from your supply chain, warehouse, CRM and other areas with an ERP, NetSuite business
intelligence tools can help you identify issues, trends and opportunities, along with the
ability to then drill down to the underlying data for even further insight.
It’s likely your business has large amounts of data that could be used to boost your
profitability. The challenge is organizing and structuring your data in such a way that you
can then glean insights. From there, you need to create clear, concise and actionable
reports and data visualizations and distributing them to key stakeholders on your team. None
of this can be done without advanced software, such as ERP products that collect and manage
all your data.
