7 Ways Business Intelligence & Automation Can Increase Productivity
by Aimee Welcome
As a business, in order to increase your revenue and stay competitive, Business Intelligence (BI) and automation tools are essential.
Today's article will address 7 ways these tools can increase productivity and enhance business development overall:
1. Access business information easily and effectively
Due to COVID-19, 2020 has moved to a more technical/digital world. Even with countries and states opening back up, more businesses than ever are paying attention to digital technology resources and realizing just how important technology is for their survival.
When it comes to building a thriving business, access to data is key to discovering business viability, how your customers think, how the public consumes your business information, catch developing trends, meet business objectives on-time and more.
Most companies are in the preliminary phase of business intelligence and only key individuals have access to analytics and reports. They typically have large amounts of data stored in different places, but aren’t able to keep track of everything or unify these different data sources. BI tools can deliver fast and accurate information to decision-makers, using a variety of data sources, without assistance from an IT department to run complex reports.
2. Eliminate manual data entry
Humans make mistakes. No matter how detailed-oriented, we are all prone to making a mistake.
Mood changes, distractions, emotions, and more can cause you to enter wrong information or make the wrong calculations. If manual data entry is still an integral part of your business, it may be time to start looking into BI tools to automate these tasks.
BI automation tools give you the ability to transfer data without mistakes. Not only will it help with errors but it is several times faster than a human being, never needing to take a break. Manual data entry also requires people. When someone is out sick, taking a vacation, growing their family, etc., there is a risk of losing vital information. However, BI automation tools give you accurate data needed to make timely and effective decisions.
3. Observe your competitors
Understanding your competitor landscape is crucial and can affect your service offerings pricing, focus areas, and weaknesses.
BI tools can sort through excessive amounts of data and identify what best correlates with you and your competitors. Setting up automation systems will allow your business to gather information about other companies in real-time and with notifications.
4. Improve the customer experience
Your customers are the heartbeat of your business. Ensuring customers have an intuitive and valuable experience is key to growing your business. BI tools can help companies better understand customer behaviors and patterns.
For example, most companies are taking customer feedback in real-time and this information can help businesses retain customers and reach new ones. These tools may also help companies identify buying patterns, which help employees anticipate a customer’s needs and deliver better service.
Other ways BI helps the customer experience:
Set up customer satisfaction surveys
Touch base with customers
Automate help desk questions and solutions
Gather patterns on consumer behavior
BI automation tools offer these and many other ways to improve customer satisfaction and advance your business.
5. Improve Business Development
BI can accurately measure the effectiveness of your business activities which allows for better ROI. CRM systems with BI intelligence can also improve sales efficiency and lead generation. It can provide marketing insights that will help you make the best decisions on spending money and track areas where you can cut costs.
6. Increase employee productivity and engagement
Improvements in this area directly correspond to your company’s output, brand recognition, and overall business health.
BI automation allows you to track, manage, and implement employee performance goals for better productivity. BI tools can also monitor, collect, analyze, manage & use data faster & more effectively.
So, instead of having your employees spend time collecting data, data entry, and analysis, BI automation can reduce that time spent so employees spend less time tracking down information and can focus on producing accurate and timely reports.
7. Improve the hiring process
Hiring and recruitment can be overwhelming at times. Before beginning the hiring process, identifying your company's needs are important to getting the right candidates.
Automated BI tools can assess the strengths and weaknesses of potential and current employees, provide relevant training programs, and assignments that build their skills, self-esteem, loyalty, and motivation to take on daily tasks and responsibilities.
A great way to keep your staff happy is to offer incentives that promote engagement. There are BI tools that can automatically send positive reinforcement badges when it recognizes positive behavior. Employees feel their efforts are appreciated and, in turn, become more productive!
BI Testimonials
"We started using Power BI a few years ago to spin up some simple reports from various sources. The great thing about the reporting is the automation. As long as I know where the data is coming from, and the source is something I can use for Power BI, I can create excellent, professional reporting that helps us make daily business decisions. It's also very reliable. Most often if there's a problem with our reports, it's due to the data source, not Power BI or its connectors."
– Richard Crane, Senior Analyst at Southwest. Gas Corporation
"Microsoft Power BI is used primarily by the Project Management department at the company to keep track of all the project metrics within the whole company, covering everything from capital expenditure projects, to customer orders, and product development projects.The different departments that aren't authoring the data and reports have access to the reports to use within their planning and departmental reports. The problem that Microsoft Power BI addresses is that everyone has clear and easy access to well displayed dashboards that display key metrics on a per project basis"
– Rick Botha, Senior Engineer at. Rheinmentall Denel Munition
Now we’d like to hear from you.
What BI/Automation tools interested you the most? Comment below!
Photos courtesy of PowerBi via iWorks.com