Whether you have been running a small business for a while or are just starting out, the concept of business intelligence may not be your top priority. Of course, running a small business comes with its stressors and more immediate concerns; however, an effective business intelligence software suite for your enterprise may provide a wide array of benefits.
With effective business intelligence software, you may be able to reduce the difficulty of logistical challenges, gain better insight into your KPIs, identify short-/long-term trends, and more.
These are some of the solutions created by business intelligence that may help your organization.
KPI
Key Progress Indicators, or KPI, are an essential tool in identifying progress for different projects or goals. A KPI in a customized software suite can provide the user with information related to finances, marketing, IT, project completion, and more. The helpful component of KPI is that it can save time for managers who are curious about the progress of different projects. It can also save time for managers who want to analyze long-term outlooks and projections for their tasks.
On the customer side of things, an effective KPI component can provide regular updates to a client. When a client uses your business to enter a contract for work, they may be curious about different goal targets being met. In order to reduce the manual labor involved in regularly drawing information from different sources, compiling a report, and relaying it to the client, a business intelligence KPI module can automatically do that for you. KPIs can also be customized to send out regular reports during certain timeframe parameters, or when certain goals are met. This is a great way to keep your customers happy and feeling like they are “in the loop.”
Business Analytics
Within the business intelligence world, business analytics is another useful tool in mapping out an organization’s future roadmap. As previously mentioned, managing a small business comes with its hurdles and challenges; however, most small businesses ideally strive for growth and increased productivity despite any present challenges they are facing. As the small business works to maintain productivity and happy clients, they can utilize business analytics to help them more efficiently map out their future path.
The key in business analytics is the ability to consider hypothetical scenarios. After gathering extensive data, including market research, customer retention, profit/loss, and other metrics, business analytics can chart out different roadmaps. These different roadmaps can help small businesses resolve their challenges, increase productivity, and more comfortably shape their future.
Trends
Analyzing short- and long-term trends provides users with quantitative data about the organization’s progress and growth. Trends can contain broad information, or narrowly focus on a single issue. For example, in order to efficiently use a tool like business analytics, the user must also have the ability to access trends. These trends can show the organization where problems may exist, or where managers could reallocate different resources. In order to identify future roadmaps and potentially change course, it is necessary to see your current trajectory.
Beyond growth, trends can also provide a keen insight into the daily inner workings of any organization or business. When narrowed down, individual productivity can be more closely analyzed. Additionally, different trends in inventory levels that change with consumer demand can also be researched. Although this information is more detailed and focused, it will help a business stay on top of their tasks and keep their customers happy.
Improved Communication with Business Intelligence
When a business’s access to data and information improves, so too will the ability to communicate. This applies to both communication within the business and communication with clients. Similar to automatically generated KPIs for customers, an effective business intelligence software suite can generate reports and automatically send them to both managers and clients. These reports can contain updates about the business, or apprise management when trends change or they must address certain issues. Whenever the involvement of manual labor is removed from a scenario, it almost entirely eliminates the risk of human error. It also saves time.
Improved communication is a significantly useful way to improve productivity. Relaying information about complex data to the appropriate parties can be a time-consuming task. Automating that process and aggregating data reduces time spent performing research and compiling the correct information.
Scalability
In order to get a proper return on investment for any business intelligence software, you must ensure it is scalable. As previously mentioned, the ideal trajectory for most small businesses is growth and increased profit. As that small business begins acquiring increased amounts of data, which can prove to be a strain on their pre-existing system, an effective business intelligence software suite will accommodate that growth. Since it’s able to handle greater amounts of data and additional tasks, a business intelligence system will be able to grow with your business.
With a good business intelligence suite, you will notice a positive feedback loop of productivity and growth. The business intelligence will allow you to grow at a more optimal rate, and at the same time the system will grow and adapt to your needs as different changes occur in your business.
Contact Ayoka Systems
At Ayoka Systems, we have extensive experience sitting down with small businesses to help them reach their goals. We make sure to spend the time to design a system that suits their needs. We also collaborate with them during the building process. After the product is delivered, we maintain continual technical support.
Ayoka Systems employs industry experts across a wide field of different sectors. We make sure to incorporate innovative ideas and new solutions. As a result, your small business will have the ability to grow with our business intelligence software. Contact Ayoka Systems today for a consultation.
