Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of technologies, processes and methods that enable companies to obtain useful information from business data. The goal of Business Intelligence is to turn data from different sources into clear and understandable information that supports company management and decision-making.

Business Intelligence connects data collection, processing, analysis and visualization. It makes it possible to track company performance, evaluate business results, identify trends and uncover relationships that might not be obvious when working with individual data sources.

How does Business Intelligence work?

A BI solution usually works with data from various business systems, such as ERP, CRM, accounting or warehouse applications.

The Business Intelligence process includes several steps:

1. Data collection: Obtaining data from various information systems.
2. Data integration: Connecting data from different sources.
3. Data processing: Cleaning, transforming and unifying data.
4. Data analysis: Evaluating results and looking for relationships.
5. Data visualization: Presenting information in reports, charts and dashboards.

What are the benefits of Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence allows companies to work with a single view of their data, improves the availability of information and supports fact-based decision-making.

The main benefits include:

• a better overview of company performance
• faster availability of important information
• connection of data from different systems
• more effective planning and management
• identification of trends and variances
• less manual work with data

What is the difference between BI and reporting?

Reporting focuses mainly on presenting data and results. Business Intelligence is a broader area that also includes data integration, data processing, analytics and preparing a basis for decisions. Reporting is therefore one of the important parts of Business Intelligence.