5 Ways in Which Business Intelligence Can Help Businesses During the Time of Crisis
Businesses across the world have been impacted by COVID-19 in unthinkable and immeasurable ways. From manufacturing companies forced to reduce production to retail companies who’ve been out of operation for weeks at a stretch, agricultural companies who’re facing challenges in bringing produce to customers, to financial companies whose stocks are crashing like never before – the losses being incurred are huge. As the business world continues to get overwhelmed by the current crisis, many are looking for ways and means to spring back into action. However, there is one thing that has come out very clearly in this situation – adopting modern technology, such as BI, can help combatting the crisis.
Although BI is already helping healthcare and government organizations provide timely and accurate information about the spread of the disease, technology holds several promises in the pandemic-struck era. With the global BI market predicted to reach $29.48 billion by 2022, the business world is geared up for widespread adoption of the technology. Through improved data analysis and faster business reporting, using BI, businesses can improve operational efficiency, empower employees, maintain the trust of customers, and strengthen competitive standing.
BI can help sustain in this time of crisis
The pace and scale of the crisis has made one point obvious: traditional wait-and-watch responses to optimizing operations will not work. Enterprises need to make data-driven decisions to devise strategies to empower employees, navigate through the crisis smoothly to earn customer trust and loyalty, stabilize operations, and optimize costs – none of which is possible without BI.
With a sound BI platform in the enterprise ecosystem, organizations can:
1. Uncover opportunities for boosting growth
Given the fact that increasing (or even sustaining) revenue has become one of the most crucial goals for enterprises in the COVID-19 era, BI can provide actionable intelligence to drive business transformation. By removing barriers between siloed data sources, BI can help integrate data from millions of datasets and provide forecasts that are not only accurate but also timely. Such insights can enable historical data analysis, helping companies uncover opportunities for growth – even as sectors plunge.
2. Formulate strategies for increasing revenue
As the pandemic strengthens its grip across the world economy, streamlining organizational processes has become a critical business prerogative. BI can generate significant insights and reports that not only reflect the impact COVID-19 has had in the past, but how the pandemic affects existing and future business operations. Furthermore, by analyzing marketing campaigns and strategies, BI can also help improve ROI for companies struggling to reduce costs to survive.
3. Discover areas for reducing costs
As the pandemic intensifies, having the financial budget sorted out has become a business priority. Modern BI tools can provide the visibility organizations need to optimize cost control and improve operational efficiencies. By identifying unnecessary costs and redundant processes, BI can list areas of business that can yield the maximum cost savings while highlighting avenues of business that require investments – such as digital workspaces, business continuity, or remote workforce.
4. Make informed decisions to minimize risks
The nature (and number) of risks that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore is devastating. BI offers a range of ready-to-use and customized dashboards and reports that can provide an end-to-end view of potential risks and challenges. By connecting to a wide array of data sources, BI can provide the figures, insights, and facts to help organizations make informed business decisions and decrease potential risks.
5. Accelerate speed to normal operations
BI visualization tools provide a quick and easy overview of data from across the organization – which can easily go unnoticed. By incorporating sophisticated data analysis tools and technologies, BI can maximize correlations, patterns, and trends and allow organizations to make data-driven decisions – without having to code or depend on data scientists for data analysis. Such real-time decision-making can pave the way for prompt resolutions, especially for business-critical operations, allowing businesses to spring back to action and normalize operations.
In the crisis-ridden world, technologies like BI can bring a lot to the table: they enable organizations to understand the challenges they are facing, assess gaps in their systems and processes, remodel their business, make the right decisions, and protect growth and profitability in the long run.