Business intelligence is aimed at collecting and processing data, present in multiple systems in your business processes, in such a way that it can be used as management information to optimally control these processes. With BI software, a BI system or separate BI tools, you can interpret and report the available data. BI systems are available for both large and small organisations. Especially with self-service BI solutions, business intelligence has become easier to apply for smaller organisations. Thanks to advanced dashboards and reporting tools, you know exactly what has happened in your business processes and what external influences there are. This allows you to better anticipate changes.
Why BI software?
CreditDevice’s credit management software ‘DirectDebiteur’ has many options for reporting and providing insight to all users through dashboards and the management information module. But using BI software, you can go one step further. By using BI in the right way, your organisation will perform better than yesterday, better than its competitors and better than the market. What you need for this? The right information that is always up-to-date in real time.
By retrieving data from different places within your company, you can analyse business processes, optimise them and discover patterns. So you know exactly how trends might develop. Even in the smallest companies today , huge amounts of data can be found. By deploying BI , you as an ICT department can create value for the entire organisation. Can you see the advantages of BI software , but do you need to convince the rest of the organisation? We list the main benefits for you.
- Always insight into business processes
- Making decisions faster and easier
- Extensive analysis of customer behaviour
- Business Intelligence is for everyone
Excel vs. BI
If you want to report in Excel, it means that the data must first be extracted to Excel . This can usually be done easily via the export functionalities of various applications. However, it is true that all those reports often look different and have a different format. This means you then have to edit the data properly. As a result, analysts spend a lot of time establishing relationships between the various Excel exports and applying formulas. This mainly involves using pivot tables and pivot charts to create beautiful reports. Is the report ready? Then the report is often sent by PDF or PowerPoint via e-mail to the various stakeholders, who need these insights.
Conclusion: the reporting process is long. On average, you spend 90% of your time creating reports, leaving only 10% of your time for analysis.
Reporting using a BI solution makes this a completely different story. After all, the time-consuming steps in Excel for collecting and retrieving the data can be automated. You only need to set all the above steps once and then the BI solution automatically repeats the whole process, every time. Then BI processes that data: relationships are made automatically, formulas are applied until the dataset is ready and dashboards can be created. These dashboards can then be shared with the relevant stakeholders.
Conclusion: with BI , you will spend only 10% of your time creating of reports and you keep much more time for analysis.
BI as a complement to DirectDebiteur
The API of our credit management software or the various export options available in DirectDebiteur, allow you to automatically fill a data warehouse in a smart way. By combining this data with data from other systems, a BI solution can offer you even more insight than the reports already available.
