Undertaking A Business Intelligence Implementation Process

27th Sep 2021

Your day-to-day operations create a lot of data. Companies can use this to streamline and enhance your business. A business intelligence implementation within your company can help improve business strategy. It can also increase your company’s productivity and profitability.

Building an intelligence strategy

First and foremost, if you intend to implement business intelligence, you need a plan to set out to yourself and others exactly the objectives are. This will include your Key Performance Indicators, such as your project and retail metrics – essentially anything that you can quantify to give you a clearer idea of how well each part of the business is running.

Getting your whole staff on board with business intelligence is important for obvious reasons. Your team must know the benefits of BI, so everyone is on the same page and committed to working hard. It will be difficult to reach your targets without this synchronicity.

Create an analytics team

You need specialised staff members to investigate your business’s data. This will require complementary business intelligence software and tools, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management system.

Your business intelligence will only be as good as the people and tools that you trust with the process, so you must choose wisely to reap the benefits over time. If you don’t have this experience in-house initially, working with a partner to develop it can be an effective solution.

Implement business intelligence technology

Once you know what you want to measure with your business intelligence implementation, and where that data is, you need to select the software to do it with. BI software doesn’t need to be expensive, but you do need to think around the practicalities of and how you will access it (for example, can you share it with your senior management with ease).

Think carefully as well around how accessible the software you choose – if you’re trying to understand your data better, you don’t want the platform you’re using to be too complex.

Review – and understand – the data

Once you’ve setup your reporting (with the help of a partner if needed) it shouldn’t take long to start seeing trends. But don’t start making decisions straightaway – give it time to see if a ‘trend’ is actually a blip.

When you’re confident in what you’re seeing from your data, you’ll likely have more questions and wider data sets that you wish to analyse. In this way, business intelligence implementation becomes almost organic.

And once your data starts informing and improving your results, your wider organisation should become interested in improving their data too.

TechReach develops BI solutions and reporting using tools such as Microsoft Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Azure. To discuss a business intelligence implementation please get in touch:

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