Solutions

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the use of technology to collect and effectively use information to improve business effectiveness. The main purpose of BI is to support better business decisions making. Thus, BI is also described as a decision support system.

BI enables your organization to track, understand, and manage your business in order to maximize enterprise performance. With a BI solution, organizations are able to improve operational efficiency, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings. In enterprise networks, BI provides employees with information to make better business decisions, and is deployed in applications that allow organizations to deliver new services and build stronger relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet. Organizations must understand and have constant visibility into their key performance indicators and metrics that span across their organizations. By doing this, organizations ensure their strategy is aligned from top to bottom and across the organization from marketing to sales to manufacturing to human resources.

The business benefits of a BI are numerous. These benefits can be grouped into three main categories: lowering costs, increasing revenue, and improving customer satisfaction among many others.
The benefits of a BI: This way, BI systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data.

The following figure summarizes a common BI cycle:


The implementation of a BI solution involves several steps during its development and can be summarized in 4 main activities: