BI Solutions
Over the last few years, the world has become increasingly data-driven. Companies, regardless of their size, are confronted with vast amounts of data, both internal and external to their business.
This leads to many new challenges and at the same time creates opportunities to leverage this data into insights that will help steer the company in the right direction. Business intelligence is aimed at helping companies achieve this goal.
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence is the transformation of data into actionable insights. The goal of these insights is to help executives, managers and workers make informed strategical and tactical business decisions.
Collecting data as a means to an end
Business intelligence is not about collecting all available data. It’s about identifying the data that matters to the decision-makers within a company. Collecting data is not an objective in itself but a means to help businesses make the right decisions. That’s why the principles of business intelligence can be applied to any company regardless of its size or the amount of data it has access to.
Transformation of data at the centre
The process doesn’t just end after data has been collected. At the centre of business intelligence is the transformation of data into actionable insights. Companies, both small and large, generally have a wide variety of separate reports available to them. The transformation of data to feed these reports is often a time-consuming and manual process. This makes the required information not readily available when decisions are made. BI solutions are aimed at helping companies transform data in an automated and integrated way, resulting in timely and accurate reporting at a reduced cost.
More than just financial data and performance
Financial data is generally a form of structured data that is available within a company. That’s why most existing reports within companies are focused on this. Making informed strategic and tactical business decisions, however, requires more than just this type of data. Identifying the information needs of the different decision-makers within a company and translating the available data into easily readable visuals requires a certain amount of insight into the data. A multidisciplinary approach is therefore key to the successful implementation of a BI solution.
Our approach to BI solutions
Within “Smart Business Solutions”, we have developed an approach that ensures you that your BI solution meets all requirements and fits your company.
Identify reporting requirements
The first step is to make an exhaustive list of all the stakeholders, decision-makers and end users for your reports. This will give you a clear idea about the target audience of your deliverables. We also ask your team the who, what and why about the reports they use together with how frequently they use these to fully understand both the users and reports required for your company.
Identify the KPIs and metrics for each BI report
Based on the interview with all stakeholders you get a list of KPIs and metrics that can be displayed on each BI deliverable. An analysis of the current reporting will show to what extent all requirements are met and how can they be improved.
Analysis of the available data sources and, if necessary, the existing data-warehouse structure
Once we have a list of metrics that you want to display on your BI reports, we will check if all data sources are readily available and accessible. We will check the quality of the available data and see which steps need to be taken to clean and structure your data.
Choose the right visualisation for each metric
One of the most common mistakes people make while presenting information visually is using the wrong chart or visualisation. It not only conveys the wrong message but in some cases, might even lead to confusion. The visualisation will be categorised by its purpose:
- Comparison
- Distribution
- Composition
- Relationship
Lay out the elements in the BI report and highlight key information
Various eye-tracking studies have proven that our eyes start from the top left corner of the page, and move to the right forming z-shaped patterns. By anticipating this natural reading pattern, your charts and reports will be even more efficient. Highlighting key information will draw attention to what’s most important.
Approval of the mock-ups
Once the mock-ups have been created, we will contact all the stakeholders to get their approval, as they are the ones who’ll be using the reports regularly. We will ensure that they understand the information presented, and also how to use them. This is an iterative process which can take weeks, as the stakeholders might not be exactly sure what they want to see on their reports, or how they want it presented.
Develop, train and deploy
Having received the approval of the stakeholders, your team gets the necessary training and we will develop the BI reports.
Our multidisciplinary team not only takes care of designing the BI report but also takes care of the development and installation of the data warehouse (where required) and the implementation of all the applications needed to process all the data in a structured manner.
Our goal is to guide you and your team and help you to grow as an entrepreneur by teaching you how to manage your resources, measure the efforts made and control your assets. Where necessary, we help you with the analysis and interpretation of the reported business information and thus support your company's decision-making.