When enterprises need to perform better against their competitors and truly assess their capabilities and opportunities, often, they turn to business intelligence solutions to help them grab that advantage. Businesses cannot afford to skip investing in business intelligence solutions in the information age we live in, as data is the new king. Without systems in place to help organize and process data and then leverage those business insights to stay competitive, businesses will not be profitable for long. So, what exactly are business intelligence solutions, and why do we need them?
What is Business Intelligence?
BI solutions are essentially the technologies and strategies that enterprises use to collect and analyze all kinds of business information and derive key insights to make profitable business decisions. These technologies deliver current, historical, and future forecasts for business operations to help enterprises better plan for future growth and mitigate risks inherent in the business cycle. Some standard functions of BI technologies include data mining, prescriptive analytics, business performance management analytics, data warehousing, benchmarking, predictive data analytics, and reporting.
Business intelligence technologies can work with massive amounts of unstructured and structured data to help identify, isolate, develop, and create strategic business opportunities that would otherwise not exist. Over time, these technologies have been developed to deliver easy interpretations of big data for consumer behavior, purchase histories, business operations, etc. Businesses looking for long-term stability and a competitive advantage work to identify new opportunities and implement effective strategies based on insights gleaned from the data.
Why Are BI Solutions Important?
Business intelligence solutions are essential because they enable enterprises to make strategic and operational business decisions supported by raw data. Gone are the days when a business hypothesis like this marketing initiative driving greater conversions is as good as a guess or a hunch. As technology has advanced, so has our ability to measure key metrics from conversions to bounce rates. As more and more data is collected, BI solutions process and analyze this data to deliver key insights that would not have been possible just a few years ago.
Because there is data to support every business function, it has gotten easier for decision-makers to make well-informed, data-backed decisions without any guesswork involved. Decisions that need to be made can range from fundamental operating decisions like pricing or product positioning to strategic decisions like achieving targeted growth goals. Power BI solutions are most effective when they combine data retrieved from the market with data collected within the business, whether operations or financial data.
When aggregated, it can be synthesized to internal and external data to provide a complete picture of where the business stands, which generates ‘business intelligence’ in some sense. We could not develop this broad, comprehensive view of the market, industry, and business as a whole if it were derived from a single data set. That is why business intelligence solutions are essential. These tools empower organizations to gain strategic insight into new markets and even assess the suitability of products and services for diverse market segments. Moreover, they help businesses evaluate the impact of marketing efforts so that key real-time decisions can be made to further those efforts or try something different.
Business intelligence solutions use both unstructured and structured data. Unstructured data contains large volumes of information required for in-depth analysis and decision making, while structured data is easy to search. Businesses may not rely on these resources because of how difficult it is to search, find, and evaluate unstructured data without statistical models. If these resources are not harnessed when making critical business decisions that influence a task, decision, or product, poorly informed decision-making will inevitably take over. The best way to ensure that high-quality, well-informed decisions are being made is to outsource business intelligence solutions to the experts. By outsourcing, all data and key information sources are being factored into every decision that will impact an enterprise, leading to better business performance and profitability.
In Demand Business Intelligence (BI) Services
There are many BI services that enterprises can opt for business intelligence outsourcing to benefit from improved profitability and outmaneuver their competition. These services include master data management, data integration, content analytics, data warehousing, and data visualizations. Let’s explore just a few of these services to understand better the entire range of services that business intelligence solutions can cover.
Business Performance Management
Outsourcing experts can help you better define your business strategy with up-to-date business information so that all decisions made are carefully aligned with the long-term vision for that project. The advantages of business intelligence can be realized as they streamline your financial processes so that fewer resources are wasted, and all redundancies are eliminated as a result. Outsourcing can also improve your workforce productivity as less time is wasted on tasks that have been identified as less critical. Finally, business performance management can enhance your profitability. This can be achieved by identifying operational costs and overheads that can be reduced in the short term to help you maintain greater profits.
Data Mining
Data mining is the process of unearthing patterns in large data sets. Raw data from business transactions hold a wealth of information that can better understand customer behavior in a meaningful way. Data mining tools can be used to penetrate deep into your business processes to learn the customer trends and patterns that impact your business daily. These patterns can be further analyzed to develop strategies to expand your business to understand why your customers behave a certain way. Data mining can help you better plan production, optimize costs, and understand your marketing efforts in a whole new light to achieve profitability in the long term.
Ad Hoc Reporting
In today’s fast-paced world, businesses need help in establishing a competitive edge and boosting their revenues. Data visualization can come in helpful in this regard as it helps key decision-makers identify and recognize patterns that will boost profits quickly through visual aid. Power BI outsourcing can ensure ad hoc reporting is in-built in their data systems to assist in decision-making. Reporting helps businesses make critical decisions with rich Power BI visualizations to help support their understanding of the problem. It focuses on visualizing data through tables, charts, graphs, and other visual forms. The idea is to graphically represent data in a form that is easily understandable for end-users. A Power BI dashboard can also be used to tell a story. They can be used to monitor a business and see all your most critical metrics at a glance so that decision-making can be accelerated.
Benefits of Outsourcing Business Intelligence(BI) Services
Access to Large Pool of Top IT Talents
One of the most significant challenges companies face is the shortage of skilled IT talent when implementing certain data analytics initiatives. Hiring a team of skilled data scientists, machine learning engineers, and data analysts in the local market can be quite the challenge. Sourcing these professionals is always expensive and time-consuming. However, outsourcing business intelligence solutions to offshore service providers can get you access to top talent in the field with the right kind of expertise and skills very effectively. This talent may even have the required project management skills needed in your industry to get your projects off the ground, given their breadth of experience.
Easy Access to Modern Infrastructure
As the volume of data keeps growing at the rate it currently does, businesses face huge challenges in effectively capturing and managing huge volumes of business data. Traditional data centers no longer cut the amount of maintenance and upkeep physical servers can require. Businesses then look to manage their data estates with cloud-computing platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Services), and Google Cloud Platform. By outsourcing your requirements to offshore partners, you can gain access to modern IT infrastructure so that you can move from traditional data centers to a modern cloud environment. Outsourcing BI solutions allow you to use cutting-edge technologies, tools, and infrastructure without needing to invest millions of dollars in bringing them in-house.
A Wealth of Industry Knowledge
It is essential to pick an outsourcing partner with a wealth of industry knowledge and expertise in business intelligence services. A partner with deep domain expertise can offer a host of competitive advantages since they are already very familiar with the unique requirements of your industry. For example, outsourcing health data analytics can provide healthcare organizations with sharper market insights, better risk management and help them improve patient care and clinical decision-making overall. These healthcare organizations will also need data analytics to improve their medical inventory management and help them optimize drug pricing. Outsourcing partners that already have deep industry knowledge will help you evaluate which areas of your business will need data analytics to boost performance, not the other way around. That is, you will not need to come up with data analytics initiatives to feed your outsourcing partner. It is because other businesses would have already sought help from your outsourcing partner to meet some basic requirements that are standard for that industry.
Staying Ahead of the Curve
Data analytics has evolved past just business intelligence and data management. Advanced analytics is now a key part of enterprises to help them keep up with the market and stay ahead of their competition. Outsourcing business intelligence solutions can help organizations keep up with constantly evolving innovations and technologies while ensuring costs stay within budget. Offshore vendors have access to a range of advanced technologies that you may not have even been considering. When cloud-based tools and cloud computing first entered the market, few enterprises contemplated investing in that technology.
However, outsourcing partners knew it would just be a matter of time before investing in cloud technologies would be essential to functioning well as an enterprise in this era. You can now migrate from legacy on-premises applications to cloud-based tools without batting an eye, as upgrading to this technology will not cost you a cent extra.
Renewed Focus on core business functions
With a dedicated team of BI specialists and data analysts, your business can benefit from the accuracy of the data collected and the visualization presented. It will further allow your business to grow, as the outsourced organization focuses on how to do this. If you want to look at other aspects of business data, these additional features can be applied without any resource expenses or strain.
Rather than expending valuable business time and resources on crafting an analytics’ solution, outsourcing allows you to focus on the primary goal of business development. By outsourcing business analytics, you are gaining the benefit of valuable business insight without having to devote all your energy to platform development.
Time and cost savings
Companies can hire business intelligence experts in-house and form their own BI department that takes care of analytics in-house. But this approach needs a lot of time and money in terms of investment, and hiring expert BI professionals is a challenging task. Outsourcing these tasks to business intelligence companies and industry professionals helps enterprises scale these functions up and down based on their business scenario. They can realize the benefits of business analytics without investing too much upfront. The costs involved for the in-house BI department include the costs involved in infrastructure, the hiring of engineers, PMs, and database experts. The time taken to train the engineers to know and understand the business data patterns and operations is immense, with huge overheads in daily operations. Outsourcing business analytics is smarter in the present era wherein BI companies deliver targeted and cost-effective solutions.
Improved Compliance
Business data is being generated at such a tremendous rate daily, and that pace is only accelerating with the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT). Businesses need to efficiently manage and analyze all this data while meeting a host of regulations in the process. For example, a systematic way to collect, store, and share business data will be required when the General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect shortly. Businesses will seek an external outsourcing partner when personally identifiable information needs to be more easily audited. When you outsource your business intelligence solutions and data analytics requirements to offshore vendors, you ensure that your data meets compliance requirements no matter what. It is because outsourcing service providers always meet regulatory and compliance requirements as that is the business that they are in. If your business needs help with meeting compliance requirements or staying on top of constantly changing regulatory requirements, outsourcing can help.
Outsourcing BI solutions can benefit your business in a host of ways. When offshore vendors provide business intelligence services, you can be assured that cost savings are not the only advantage you will gain. You will also gain access to a wealth of knowledge about the industry you are in. Your outsourcing service provider will help you establish business metrics for your industry as they have enough experience in the field to separate the essential from the non-essential metrics out there. They will fundamentally take care of end-to-end business intelligence services for your organization so that all your bases are covered.
Moreover, you will benefit from improved compliance as outsourcing partners often have invested in this area to keep their clients ahead of the curve. If hiring an in-house team of IT specialists is not within your budget, outsourcing can be an easy fix. You get access to a large pool of top tech talent that other companies would not have access to, which will help your profitability. Finally, outsourcing BI solutions will give you access to the most cutting-edge infrastructure and technologies in the market to give you a competitive edge. If you are looking to turn over your business operations to the experts in the industry, offshore trust vendors to handle your BI requirements.
Who We Are and Why Our Expertise Matters?
This article is brought to you by Flatworld EDGE, an IT solutions provider specializing in infrastructure management, mobile app development, software testing services, and custom software development. With over ten years of experience in the field, we know how to help our clients develop new business opportunities and drive performance. We specialize in generating business intelligence solutions that will help our clients better manage and analyze volumes of data to drive better decision-making and profitability. Our clients trust us to help them cut costs, access the best tech talent out there, and stay ahead of the curve competitively.