In this article, we will discuss how we can use BI in our day to day businesses in order to achieve success, In order for you to take advantage of your data, you need to analyze & report it to the right people at the right time so they can act on it! The company needs to invest in the right business intelligence in order to comply, react & thrive in this ever changing world.

Here are 4 ways to use business intelligence to tackle your problem & achieve greatness:

1. Use BI to Increase Sales:

BI has been successful for thousands of retail, textile, distribution and manufacturing companies. BI helps you to identify where sales are performing well & where improvement is needed. Moreover, BI can help a company tract their sales data at individual customer levels and it can reveal trends as well as opportunities to position your company for better growth & stability.

By studying sales trends, you can understand what your customers are buying and what they are not. This can feed opportunities to your sales team which can help them identify potential areas to increase profits within an existing customer base.

One study suggests that the “probability of selling to an existing customer is far greater than selling to a new customer”. It is possible to use BI to find ways to reengage and inspire existing customers.

2. Use BI for More Efficient Inventory Management:

Keeping too much stock can be damaging to cash flow, a great BI solution enables you to analyze your supply chain & ensure you have optimal inventory levels. When Predictive modeling is applied to BI, this can help you navigate seasonal changes and identify consumer demand.

Here’s how BI helps with inventory management:

Stock on hand – BI lets you quickly and easily evaluate how much stock you have on hand for a particular product.

Measure Overstock – Use historical sales data in your BI solution and compare it to stock on hand. If you’re historical data shows you sell very little of a product but you have a lot of it in stock, it can be identified as overstock.

Under stock – If historical data shows particular sales are increasing or a product has a long lead time from your supplier, you run the risk of under stocking these items. This can lead to problems with fulfilling customer orders.

Dead stock – Inventory that is sitting on the shelves which are not being sold can be costly. Using BI to analyze stock on hand versus units sold over the course of a year can alert you of dead stock.

Effective stock management is crucial to a company’s success. A promise to deliver products within a certain time frame plays a key role in securing sales. Failure to deliver on time and in full will cause customers to turn to your competitors.

3. Use BI for Better Financial Management:

Financial statements are just the tip of the iceberg. The right BI solution can blend financial statements with real–time data analytics to improve revenue and manage expenditures.

Balance sheets & cash flow can be analyzed using dashboards, graphs and charts to better manage your company’s financial status.

BI is also useful in helping you solve the challenge of managing rebates. What was once a chaotic process is now made easy. Eliminate painful spreadsheets and enjoy a simple, 360-degree view of your rebates.

4. Use BI to Free up Your IT Department:

A great BI solution is one that is user friendly, giving the executives and CEO’s data on their fingertips. Making the main idea behind it is to make sure you don’t need technical skills to use the software.

This is a big advantage for your IT department who are traditionally the only ones capable of running complex reports. As more data is available to companies, IT departments are under more pressure to run faster reports, leading to errors.

Using BI to analyze your data can reveal actionable insights, allow you to create relevant KPIs, identify strategic priorities, and use facts and not just gut-instinct when it comes to decision-making.