ERP Software

Business Intelligence Software

Business Intelligence, or BI, is a catch-all term used to refer to the many tools and systems that can participate in the major strategic planning processes of a company. These tools and systems represent the combination of software applications, methodologies, and systems that foster the strategic planning process within a company. Their purpose is to promote improved decision-making by company leaders; this is accomplished by collecting, storing, accessing, and analyzing all kinds of corporate data that enters the software from the various departments of the company. Most often, these integrated systems will provide business intelligence in areas such as: customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, inventory analysis, and distribution analysis.

A Business Intelligence Software solution replaces the multiple tools traditionally used to collect and analyze the data.  Without employing Business Intelligence Software, companies are left to collect all this data and keep track of it using a broad range of software, each operating under its own code.  Naturally, such a structure is cumbersome and makes it difficult to retrieve the data in any kind of reasonable time, thereby negating the positive effect of being able to analyze all that collected information in the first place.

Business Intelligence Software is software that has been particularly developed to collect, store in one place and then analyze any data from disparate parts of the company helpful to running the business. This comprehensive software allows management to examine the correlation between data incoming from different departments. As a result, better decisions are made by management and resources are allocated in a more cost-effective manner. There are a few BI software systems on the market that will even allow companies to intermingle external information –for example, cost of living index factors, price of gasoline, the job market in a certain area- as a way to produce even more information applicable to market swings and customer behavior.

At this point, very few business leaders would argue that Business Intelligence Software would not prove profitable, producing concrete benefits. Nevertheless, this fact does not mitigate the high cost of the software systems. Right now, an average BI Software project for a large company will cost upwards of one-hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Some of the largest projects can hit a price tag of over a million dollars. Clearly, this is money that needs to be carefully allocated, before it is spent. A company hoping to consolidate and coordinate their business systems has to make sure it is worth the cost.

Written by :

Amy Cruz