Business leaders have sensed a paradigm shift in data analytics and report building. Reports suggests that the self-service Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tools will touch $14.19 billion by 2026 with more businesses opting for them. Although there are several reasons behind this shift, the major advantage is to eradicate staff’s dependency on IT personnel for report extraction purposes.
Leaders are applying a more strategic approach towards effective and informed decision-making by analyzing and comparing data. Hence, business reports provide the ability to think, absorb and adapt effective and scalable resources. However, the question is, do IT-generated spreadsheets provide the right insights?
The answer will be – No.
Organizations need more agile BI analytics platforms to analyze data efficiently. Moreover, the numbers stated above are enough to validate the relevance of Ad-hoc or self-service BI reporting tools. Easy access to customized reports empowers various departments and vertical managers to monitor reporting insights that would have otherwise remained overlooked completely.
Agility to access insightful reports makes the case stronger for adopting BI reporting software in organizations. Let’s look at some of the benefits of Business Intelligence Reporting Software.
Why Opt for BI Reporting Software?
The main objective of BI reports is to deliver comprehensive data analysis that can deliver actionable insights for faster decision making. There are several compelling reasons that implement BI reporting software in an organization. Let’s get familiar with them one by one:
- It Makes Ad-hoc Reporting Possible
Departments face challenges when making timely decisions due to delays in getting end-to-end managed reports. The problem gets more complex when departments procure data from various data sources like ERPs, CRMs, APIs, and more. By using BI reporting tools, organizations can apply data connectors to centralize all data in one place, making ad-hoc reporting possible. BI analytics tool generated reports are accessible to employees who have the right credentials using secure logins and access management. These tools can make it easier for employees to crunch the data in order to understand essential business metrics. This improves efficiency on multiple levels along with improving employee experience.
- Ideal for Implementation Across the Organization
New age BI reporting tools provide personalized and customized insights. Organizations can anticipate bigger picture by aggregating data from multiple departments. A smart BI reporting tool ensures that all the metrics are under one single system. Various levels of the organization can create dashboards that suit their strategic needs. Different department heads can get an overview of their departmental activities by establishing suitable KPIs. Personalized and customized dashboards allow them to make timely and informed decisions.
- Real-time Business Intelligence Reporting
Business Intelligence reporting software enables access to relevant and real-time data. It leverages smart data storage solutions like real-time and business intelligence tools to make smarter decisions. Real-time business intelligence reporting has a competitive advantage that promotes instant decision-making in critical matters. With real-time business reporting analysis, interactive reports are drawn that allows business leaders to have a 360-degree overview of the business’s ongoing operations.
- Analysis and Prediction of Customer Behavior
Customer buying behaviors keep changing. However, customers can interact with an organization through numerous mediums – chatbots, social media, emails, or direct interaction. Increased customer communication touch points provide deep data. Leaders can use these interactive reports to identify issues and anomalies along with predicting patterns of customer behaviors. This approach makes organizations proactive and helps to generate positive customer experiences.
- Operational Optimization
Reports are crucial at all levels, whereas the parameters for generating reports keep changing. Departments use KPIs to measure, compare, and evaluate success. Leaders can drill down and drill through from visual to get into the granular or summary level. Further, by using multiple data slicers and filters, managers can make the reports more customized. It increases operational efficiency by drawing attention to non-performing processes. As a result, reports keep departments and organizations stuck to operational efficiency.
- Cost Optimization
Cost optimization is another crucial factor to consider. BI survey suggests that more than 50% of business intelligence users reported that ad-hoc reports, customer behavior analysis, real-time process monitoring and fast decision-making are the most prominent benefits that helped organizations to reduce costs and increase profit margins. Businesses can achieve far better results and make profitable adjustments by working faster and more accurately.
- Informed Decision Making
For decision-making or strategy formulation, it’s essential to use digital data to see the bigger picture. BI reporting dashboards provide relevant data that is intuitive and visual. It allows leaders to easily spot patterns and trends to uncover groundbreaking insights. BI Reports are helpful for complex jobs like streamlining budgets, putting together a targeted marketing campaign and improving an internal process. Therefore, BI analytics and reporting provide agility to make timely and informed decisions.
- Visualization
Dashboards and interactive data visualization improves understanding, allow collaboration, and share information across an organization. Data visualizations make the reports interactive with charts, graphs, and maps. It produces reports that are more appealing and easier to understand. Another added feature of these tools is creating custom dashboards with the drag-and-drop tool, which can further make reports more project-centric.
- Streamlined Procurement Processes
Organizations that deal in procurement of high turnover of goods or services find BI reporting softwares efficient for understanding logical patterns and insights. The functionality will filter down through every core facet of the organization and highlight the gaps in sustainability. Clear-cut visualization of various metrics makes the procurement process effective.
- Enhanced Data Quality
Organizations deal with a high data flow. However, not all data leads to logical reasoning. But with BI reporting tools, organizations can make the right insights without ignoring the sensitivity of data.
In a nutshell
On one side, BI analytics and reporting leverage interdependence from IT departments. At the same time, it empowers departments and strategic teams to make fast decisions. Otherwise, the purpose of getting data will get derailed if organizations don’t make the best of BI analytics reporting.
