Getting A Business Intelligence Tool - The Hard Way & The Easy Way

“If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” When you think about this quote, it should immediately become apparent how true it is. Because, if you can't measure something, and define the measurable goals to establish the desired outcome, you can't possibly get better at it. Or worse, you can’t even manage it.

Be it managing the personal finance of a person who lives from pay cheque to pay cheque or a Fortune 500 company with billions of dollars in reserve, this holds. Well for one, in the case of an individual that needs to track his/her spending habits there are a ton of apps for individuals (I counted 75 in the play store while writing this article). But for companies, this does not work and so they generally use multiple excel files (with 50 tabs) to track the expense. This makes life difficult for all the stakeholders in terms of collaboration, editing, suggesting changes, etc.

The above is just one example of KPI measurement (expense tracking) in one department, Finance. Think about a mid-size company (~100 employees) and the various departments within. We are already losing count of the number of Key metrics to measure (commonly known as KPIs).

Here is where Business Intelligence Tools come into the picture. By feeding in relevant data, BI Tools can rapidly speed up decision-making; as a result, you can easily identify process gaps and fix them early. A BI tool is designed to allow various users to query and report from dashboards. Used by managers and employees, BI tools ensure that data is standardized, allowing better understanding by all employees

When BI tools were new to the market, they were generally used by Accounts and Finance teams, since they deal with a large amount of data, however, in the last decade, it has been slowly adopted across various business verticals like customer relationship management, sales management, Supply chain, HR, etc.

How to implement a BI tool?

There are majorly 4 steps involved in any BI implementation.

1.??????Identification of data sources – Excel sheets, CRM, ERP, HRMS, Finance tools, etc.

2.??????ETL (Extract Transfer Load) – Need this to collect raw data from various sources, sort and transform hence making it ready for use in the BI application.

3.??????Data Storage – To Centralise all the processed data in one place

4.??????Visualization – The stored data will be converted to charts and dashboards ready for analysis.

Now coming to the Hard Way

Companies usually purchase ETL, Data storage, and visualization layers separately which leads to added costs. On top of this, the implementation, testing, and training will cost the company lot of time and resources.

The Easy Way

There are solutions in the market that offer all 4 capabilities together along with Natural language Querying (NLQ) and Predictive analytics. With the NLQ capabilities, the stakeholder can interact with the tool in simple English to get the answers without having to read a large number of charts and the prediction capabilities can predict the success of a decision with minimal error margin, hence offering a significant competitive advantage.

Lumenore is one such tool in the market where you purchase one license for all your BI needs. They do offer a free trial (no credit card required) and are open to partnership opportunities across the globe.

A great BI tool is a valuable asset for any organisation and these BI tools are saving billions of dollars in opportunity cost to companies across the globe every year.