“ SON BI allow you to see beyond of data”

Business Intelligence

Contemporary economic conditions show organizations are increasingly using information resources. In today’s decision making, access to information is essential, and organizations must move towards the development of performance indicators in their area of business, since they can take a realistic approach to business operations, customers, suppliers, and more.

Business Intelligence 

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies that convert raw data into useful and meaningful information, helping administrators use huge amounts of information to identify and develop new opportunities and make their decisions on the basis of reality, not speculation, and by applying an effective strategy, they will show optimized performance at the right time.

Organizations generally deal with a large amount of data and information about their subsidiaries that are stored in various databases in a variety of forms. In summary, the problems organizations encounter with their data are listed below:

  • Lack of access to timely information, for the process of performance control
  • Impossibility to control the accuracy of the data received from subsidiaries
  • Lack of integrated information (data is received from various parts of each subsidiary and in various forms)

Importance of Business Intelligence

Nowdays, in a competitive  environment, the company which have the right information is powerful. Awareness of market demand, customer requirements, internal conditions of organization, and the determination of the business area is prerequies for decision making, and only business intelligence provide accurate understanding of environment changes.

Five essential steps can be taken to establish a business intelligence system within an organization. These steps include:

  • Identify required information of organization

At this phase, decide what we want to know? Answering this question will lead to knowing the organization’s needs for making key business decisions. In different departments of each organization, there are different questions for managers, and there are different criteria for performance evaluation, all of which need to be identified.

  • Data sources

Most organizations have different systems and data sources, and even produce separate applications that have led to different data sources.These data sources can include data from different databases or projects records, plans, actions, financial documents, instructions, or information available on the organization’s software. In line with the implementation of the business intelligence process, these data are loaded in the analytical database.

  • Extract, Transform, and Load Data (ETL)

At this phase, extraction, transformation and data loading is done. During the ETL process, the data is extracted from the data resources, such as databases, text files, old systems and spreadsheets, and converted into compatible information in a certain format which store in data warehouse.

  • Analytical database

An analytical database or data warehouse is considered as the cornerstone of any business intelligence solution. Data warehouse is responsible for keeping all data from the database after organizing and homogenizing. These data are then available by decision makers and analysts through the ultimate tools such as dashboards or applicable reports.

A well-designed data warehouse must take into account the current and future needs of the user and be optimized at the same time for fast and interactive access. Also, the data warehouse must be flexible enough to protect the rapid growth of data and changes within the organization. In fact, the data warehouse is a collection of information that is appropriately designed to perform data analysis based on various parameters.

  • Provides and displays information

Implementing this phase allows users and administrators to access data within the data warehouse.

The managerial dashboard is a tool used by indicators, reports, and charts that managers can observe the performance of organization at any time. Dashboards are a set of functional indicators (PIs), key performance indicators (KPIs), and other information related to the organization. KPIs are essentially indicative of organization success in achieving strategic goals.

Benefits  of business intelligence

  • Advanced analytics for better decisions
  • More accurate reporting and planning
  • intuitive drag-and-drop interface for reports creation with no coding required
  • Effectively translate company strategy into meaningful KPIs
  • Reduce costs and create value by gaining information at the right time
  • Increase the speed of receiving reports
  • Accelerate return-on-investment
  • Flexibility in the generating of various reports required by users