How do businesses make decisions with BI?

By utilizing a fact-based, real-time, singular version of the truth, business people are empowered to achieve and maintain a competitive edge through the use of customisable business intelligence. Executives, CFOs, branch managers and your sales team have immediate access to crucial information to make fast and educated decisions.

Data is available across core business processes such as industry trends, customer behavior, productivity, inventory, and detailed financial analysis. Business intelligence software extracts the information, transforming it into clear insights to enable actionable and strategic decision-making so people can readily achieve their goals.

Better sales decisions

Industry specific business intelligence enables companies to discover detailed sales trends based on their customers’ preferences, reactions to promotions, online shopping experiences, purchasing habits, and patterns and trends which affect sales. Leveraging customer buying habits permits a company to decide the best course of action to retain valuable customers and take advantage of missed sales opportunities.

By drilling down to such comprehensive insights, a company can quickly decide which link-sell opportunities to increase or which products are best for cross selling. By identifying customers in decline, a business can determine the best plan to reposition the product before they stop buying altogether. Sales managers are able to identify the best type of customers, where to find them, and determine the most effective acquisition and conversion strategies. By identifying bottom-buyers, a company may make decisions around the best promotional strategies or whether to let those customers go.

Having a clear picture of sales trends also allows collaboration in marketing and management decision-making.

Better marketing strategy

By monitoring trends to determine customer preferences, a company can quickly make strategic marketing decisions to best capitalize on their products or services. Data analytics software can identify promotional returns and analyze campaign outcomes. A company can now use it to decide how to prioritize campaigns, tailor promotions, and engage in social media to maximize marketing efforts. This enables a company to make decisions that will fine-tune their marketing strategies, reduce overhead and garner a better return on investment.

Better business decisions

Data analytics allows executives to make decisions based on statistical facts. Those facts can be used to guide choices about future company growth by evaluating a long-term view of the market and competition. Data analytics can help Executives decide how to streamline processes by using visualizations identifying the productivity in each area of the company, including employee management. By identifying actionable insights, a manager can determine the most effective strategies to improve employee productivity, streamline the recruitment process, or reduce employee turnover. Data analytics allows Executives to funnel all of the facts into making crucial operational decisions.

Better inventory decisions

Using data analytics to identify problem areas and opportunities allows a company to make decisions that will refine their inventory management. For example, the decision to reduce excess inventory also reduces the cost to maintain it. With better visibility, a company can make better decisions about how much to order and when. Knowing a product’s ordering patterns along with the best times, prices, and quantities to buy also allows managers to change pricing tiers to increase profit margins and capitalize on every opportunity.

Better financial decisions

Data analytics offers an up to date view of a company’s financial picture. A Manager can view profit and loss, general ledger, and balance sheet figures through features such as Phocas' Financial Statements. Top-notch BI will allow businesses to drill all the way down to individual transactions to get instant answers to revenue opportunities and cost concerns. By examining incoming and outgoing finances of the present and past, a business can make decisions based on the company’s future financial status. Breaking down revenue by location evaluates the strength of product lines by branch. For example, a business may decide to remove a specialty item from one location and increase its promotion in another. Customizing the dashboard allows Executives to track key performance indicators (KPI’s) to enable effective financial oversight and management.

By analyzing data and monitoring critical business operations, a company is well positioned for successful strategic decision-making based on factual insights and “one view of the truth.”