What is BI?
Business Intelligence tool is the one which converts huge raw data into meaningful information enabling everyone to leverage data into business advantage. It helps the user to explore the data and draw insights and meaningful conclusions from it.
Analysis from multiple dimensions in a single screen
BI tool allows the user to analyze the business data from multiple dimensions. For example a sales data can be analyzed from various dimensions like, items, item groups, customers, areas, states, countries, sales reps, days, weeks, months, quarters, years etc..
When the number of dimensions becomes too much it will become difficult to draw reports in any software producing static reports and maintain them. The way BI renders these analytical reports on a single screen is really mind blowing.
User clicking on the elements of a dimension, the display of report changes to show only for the selected dimension. The user can think of asking any question combining any number of dimensions in any order he wants.
Enormous time saving in MIS report making
In sales analysis, the numbers of dimensions are approximately 11. The amount of reports one has to make to analyze the data from all possible combinations for the above dimensions would be around 11! (11 factorial), that means a few lakhs of reports. Just imagine making these many reports in excel and managing it. BI is a huge time saver!
Extensive analysis
BI tool can provide the following analysis:
a. Performance analysis:
Performance over any time buckets for any entity like item, customer, region, item groups etc.
b. 80 – 20 analysis:
For any entity like customer, sales rep, item, region, item groups etc.
c. Trend analysis:
By comparison over long time period the trends could be analyzed.
d. Season analysis:
A spider chart brings the season of a selected item in a selected area or country.
e. Geographical Spread Analysis:
The geographical spread can be brought in a Map for a selected country or region.
f. Entity Analysis:
For selected entity all the details can be brought in single dash board to know the complete transactions of the entity.
Suppose you are meeting a customer. You want to analyze his business. On selecting the customer concerned, the BI brings the list of all sales you have made to him, the total discounts enjoyed by him so far, net realization from him, his outstanding with you, his payment discipline, his pending orders with you, list of items bought by him every month, sales trend with him etc., are instantly available for analysis.
For a selected employee, His overall attendance percentage, total number of late comings, total number of early comings, his loan details, his leave details and his career growth in the organization are all can be seen in dash boards.
Similar analysis for other entities like customer, item, sales rep, supplier, accounts are all possible in analysis.
g. What-If analysis:
You can see sensitivity analysis with related data. For example you can see what will be the increase in the margin, if you increase the price by 5% or increase the volume by 10% or reduce the cost by 2%.
Similarly if a raw material is used in many end items (FG) the user can see what will be the effect on all the end items if the raw material price increases/decreases.
Information at all levels
BI can present the information at the top level and allows the user to drill down to many further sub levels making the same report relevant for all levels of management.
Easy to use:
Since he user has to learn not more than just clicking and searching, the time taken to learn to use a BI reports is a few minutes only.