Every day your company generates tons of information. The history of your relationships with customer's completed orders, clients’ feedback, leads, and opportunities — are only a few examples of what you have to deal with every day. Besides, there are dozens of external factors having a significant impact on your company. Changes in the economic environment or seasonal demand for certain groups of goods are aspects that you can barely influence. Nonetheless, you can’t underestimate them if you want to ensure that your organization is evolving and prospering.

The need to track all these and many other indicators lead to additional complications and give new possibilities. For example, to keep your information safe and easy to access, you must invest in reliable local or cloud storage. On the other hand, careful analysis of this info can help you develop a new vision and lower the probability of risks. Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) are solutions allowing you to benefit from using the info you have gathered and turned it into an effective plan of improving your business processes. Today, we’ll learn their main features to understand better which of them can handle your current problems and help plan ahead.

Clarifying Your Company’s Current State

Business Intelligence allows representing all collected info in a way allowing to interpret it without any significant issues and extracting essential insights from it. The skillful application of Business Intelligence apps will enable you to sort, filter, and categorize chunks of data to build a single picture of how your organization behaves at the moment. Adopting Business Intelligence apps can be a decent choice if you want to optimize workflow, generate regular interactive reports, and better achieve the goals you set for your company.

To extract useful information from big data, you can use a wide range of apps such as Business Intelligence dashboards or operational reports, for example. The exact set of applications that can ensure the optimal outcome strictly depends on the specifics of your company. Therefore, there’s no solution that will help solve the problem of every company in the market. However, there are some common aspects in almost every case.

Data warehouse allows storing the information from different departments and providing centralized access to it. According to the needs of a company, Business Intelligence applications can extract valuable metrics from this data and represent it in an easy-to-understand way. End-users of such systems can generate advanced reports and perform data discovery operations for detecting various patterns and use this info for developing effective development strategies.

Predicting The Outcomes of Your Future Actions

Business Analytics enables the utilization of data for predicting how productive your future actions will be and how they’ll affect you. With this info available, you can enhance its performance and prepare for future changes. Skillful application of business analytics practices is crucial for researching new opportunities, developing reliable strategies for building solid relationships with new customers, and predicting upcoming risks more accurately.

It’s important to note that in this case, the application practice is quite varied. When business owners plan to enter new markets or present new products or services, Business Analytics can be pretty helpful in predicting future customers’ preferences. With this info in mind, it’s easier to prepare an effective promotion plan and define your branding strategy.