Why you're lost
without BI solutions 5 Reasons

Globalization and endless Data

Are you spending far too long analyzing your decision-relevant data and creating a solid basis for your decisions? At the same time, is your email inbox getting fuller and fuller and you actually have a million other things on your mind? Thanks to globalization and digitalization, we are virtually flooded with information from an incredible number of sources every day. There is often no land in sight. So which data is important? And what do we even do with it?

Furthermore, there are competitors all over the world today. It’s not just the company in the neighborhood. We are also forced to make decisions faster and work more efficiently and are less and less allowed to rely on our gut feeling. To do this, we need up-to-date, transparent data that we can rely on at virtually all times, preferably organized centrally.

The possibilities of simple table tools are no longer sufficient for this. We need to take an even more systematic approach and let’s be honest: even my 94-year-old grandpa used to work with isolated Excel spreadsheets. 😊

This is where BI solutions come into play - if you haven’t heard of them yet: “BI” stands for “Business Intelligence.”

What is Business Intelligence?

The term sounds pretty professional, but what does it mean? At first glance it is probably about intelligently analyzing data for your business.

And this is what BI solutions actually do:

• You collect data
• You prepare the data for analysis
• You develop queries
• You present the important information clearly - for example in dashboards or reports

And for all departments of your company. Whether it’s controlling, purchasing, HR or sales. From CRM contacts to project management tools. What’s more: BI facilitates decisions at all management levels - from lower to upper management.

The whole thing almost reminds of storytelling. In BI, data is presented in graphics and images in a dynamic, interactive and lively way, as if they were short stories.

How does this work? Simply put, your internal and external raw data is loaded into a central data warehouse. The information is processed there and made available to the BI solutions. These in turn analyze and display it. Both data mining systems and reporting systems or systems for online analytical processing (OLAP) are possible applications.

With BI Solutions, you can manage your “Mountains of Data” efficiently - and not just by Gut Feeling. What you get out of it

1. First of all, you get transparency of all data that is relevant for your decisions, no matter how many sources it comes from. Infographics and diagrams give you a clear overview. For example, in the form of dashboards. As key figures and metrics are much easier to understand when you see them visualized in front of you.

2. You can make important decisions faster and more sustainably and are not necessarily dependent on external support, giving you an advantage in a highly competitive market. Whereas marketing used to have to go to the IT department for information like a schoolchild, colleagues can now get the necessary evaluations from the BI system themselves.

3. You can tailor the reports to your own needs, because they are not predefined as in Business Central, for example. If you now integrate new departments, products or customers or classify your clientele, this is very straightforward. This is because new data can be integrated quickly and information that is not relevant for the decision can be filtered out directly.

4. Advantages 1 to 3 have a great “side effect”, especially in the fields of controlling and reporting: they save time and costs! Logical, if the decisions are so much easier.

5. BI solutions - such as Microsoft’s Power BI - are easy to handle - even without specific IT knowledge. As a non-IT specialist, there are no problems to deal with the unknown tool - again, the example of the marketing department is quite appropriate. You save on costly and time-consuming training. These are even more financial advantages.

Microsoft Power BI: perfect for Beginners and easy to integrate

Microsoft’s Power BI in particular is not just for IT geniuses - even complete BI beginners can take their first steps into previously unknown territory. Reasons for this are Power BI’s intuitive design and the drag & drop principle. You may already be familiar with this from Microsoft products such as Outlook and OneNote: you click on something, hold down the mouse button and move it to another location.

You can also use Power BI cloud-based - so you don’t need to set up any additional hardware. The trend towards the cloud is also evident in other Microsoft applications, above all Dynamics 365: cloud revenues increased by 38% in the first quarter of 2021.

Further advantages: your data is updated automatically and you can collaborate with multiple users in real time.

As Power BI was developed by Microsoft, it is also possible to integrate other applications such as Business Central. The two solutions go hand in hand. And that’s not all. You get benefits from Microsoft’s extensive global partner ecosystem.

BI Solutions are a Must-have - also for SMEs and across Industries

Data analysis with simple tables is “old school” in 2021. Without intelligent BI solutions, you are lost in the face of the amounts of data and data resources in global competition. Even a start-up that specializes in stick-on nail polish needs BI today.

In your “data cockpit” with an all-round overview, you make well-founded decisions that will sustainably improve the entire company when it comes to whether you should invest in a new product series or not. Or how to plan your raw materials purchasing more efficiently. Or what you can do to increase the conversion rate of your website.

Even if you sometimes still feel overwhelmed by the flood of information: BI will help you achieve your business goals in the long term. And that’s what matters at the end of the day.