Business intelligence (BI) powers better business-critical decision-making with the help of meaningful insights and data visualizations. While it is becoming pretty mainstream for companies of all sizes, understanding the importance of analytics and BI is one thing, and ensuring it is carried out efficiently and accurately to drive the desired outcomes is another.
To enable this, proper solutions and processes need to be in place, especially those that follow the industry best practices. New-age BI solutions simplify the entire process of achieving analytics and BI, and some also eliminate the need to have any technical expertise in coding or SQL.
At STAEDEAN, based on our 18+ years of industry experience, we aim to incorporate this with our data science solutions by ensuring they are self-configurable, easy to use, and built specifically to your industry/department needs.
In this blog, we discuss how you can get the most out of your analytics and BI investments by understanding the industry best practices and how they can help organizations realize end-to-end analytics successfully.
Business intelligence best practices you should incorporate in your organization
Incorporating BI best practices is crucial to gaining and leveraging the right insights to lead your company toward more significant heights. Whether it is streamlining operations, keeping up with the changing market trends, or empowering your teams, the necessary data can help improve performance and foster overall growth.
Here are the top 5 best practices for the industry you need to know to optimize your business intelligence efforts.
Organization buy-in
It is important that your analytics and BI efforts must get a buy-in from your entire organization to maximize its success. Having disjointed or siloed BI practices would mean failure rather than something to be desired. Therefore, in the best interest of the organization as a whole, the right parties and stakeholders need to be involved from the word go, including the C-suite. Attaining the value of investment from the right roles and departments in the early stages of your BI efforts can help achieve clarity, focus on the right aspects, and provide an additional knowledge base for successful implementation.
Identifying the data sources
No matter the size of the organization, data is collected on a daily basis surrounding most business processes and operations. However, the data is not easily accessible or found in a single place and is distributed among various systems, such as databases, Excel spreadsheets, CRMs, etc. Given this, getting the needed information can be challenging, which is precisely why identifying the necessary data sources is a great practice. With the right data analytics solution in hand, you will be able to gather data from various sources quickly and smoothly. But this can be made easy if you approach data from the point of view of a question or a problem that needs to be solved, so that the data you have access to can be used to answer/solve it.
Start small
As much as we want to get started on everything together and go big, it is generally not a good practice, and it’s the same with your BI journey as well. Although there might be a lot you need answers for and get insights into, you wouldn’t want to get overwhelmed. The better option would be to start small with the crucial tasks/questions and then slowly build up to what is on your roadmap. Additionally, this would help identify the right data sources, the type of data you need, or what you are missing. BI is a step-by-step process that would often require high levels of patience, and you need to understand that it is an ever-evolving world where constant modifications and iterations are part and parcel. Therefore, in order to support long-term growth, implementing small objectives with the right balance can drive efficiency and transformation.
Prepare a BI framework
Before getting started on your BI or data science tasks and initiatives, it is essential to draw out a project outline and scope and assess the requirements thoroughly to develop a unified strategy. Create a benchmark for all the technical and reporting needs, keeping in mind the changes that may occur, in which case planning for scalability and extensibility can help. Also, collaborating with the right stakeholders to agree upon the expectations, goals, desired insights, KPIs, data sources, and such are some aspects that need to be well documented. Designing a strategy that is measurable and transparent means the roles of each individual and department are well-defined, laying a solid groundwork for the later stage of implementation.
Selecting the right visualization and reporting tools
Just having the information is not enough; presenting it in the right manner that is easy to understand is equally important. Data visualizations in recent times are going beyond just your typical dashboards. While many visualization tools are available in the market, not all will suit your needs. It would help if you kept in mind your business goals and audience to extract and act on the insights to drive better outcomes. Modern visualization and reporting tools have evolved over time due to factors such as migration to the cloud, the rise in SaaS applications, and ever-changing user expectations. Thus, your visualization and reporting solution should be able to understand and work with your preferences to aid in making better data-driven decisions.
How can having the right data analytics and BI solution help?
Armed with the right data analytics and BI solution, companies can now push toward optimizing their operations, drive cost efficiency, enhance business processes, and promote better decision-making at an organizational level.
STAEDEAN's Data Analytics Solution for Dynamics 365 F&SCM makes it easy to enable end-to-end analytics in an organization efficiently. It is a no-code solution, with easy plug-and-play modules and interactive dashboards to help access meaningful, action-oriented insights in no time. Moreover, our solution also facilitates end-to-end data management, such as data integration, data modeling, data migration, data governance, data quality, and data security in D365 F&SCM.
With so many organizations jumping onto the BI bandwagon and sharing their success stories, you would not want to fall behind. If you would like to dive into the world of analytics and business intelligence further and leverage what it has to offer, we recommend that you download our eBook "How to Get the Most Out of Business Analytics" from the link given below.
Sumana Samuk
