Businesses across all industries are increasingly adopting business intelligence (BI) and for a good reason. BI can help enterprises unleash the full power of their data for measurable business improvement. Advanced analytics with data science and machine learning can enable organizations to unravel and solve some of their most pressing business challenges. 

The Gap: Business Intelligence Tends to Get Stuck in Silos

While BI hold immense potential to bring out business critical insights and forecasts, the challenge is that its usage remains siloed. 

In most enterprises BI has long been the playground of IT professionals, data administrators, and system administrators, who are happy to pass along the insights they’ve mined to their respective business leaders and executives. While these data-driven insights might get talked about in technical and C-suite circles, the outcomes of these insights often do not even make it out of the boardroom or are shared as passive information.  As a result, by the time the information reaches to the person who needs to make a decision or take action, it gets too late. 

The Opportunity: Empower Every Operational Level of Business with BI

The opportunity, then, is to help business users tap into the power of BI at operational levels within their organizations. If business users can derive meaningful insights from their everyday, operational data, this can help them to make more informed decisions, reduce iterations, and take prompt action to optimize processes, thus saving both time and money. Businesses need a strategy and framework for applying the power of BI to daily, real-world business operations within an organization. 

How Operational Business Intelligence (OBI) Can Improve Your Business Operations

Operational BI is really about utilizing business intelligence to improve the real-world performance of an organization, all the way down to the level of daily operations. The right BI platform can deliver instantaneous data analysis that is relevant to the daily tasks of every user and role within an enterprise. Choosing the right BI software is one of the best strategies a business can use to boost the effectiveness of all of its business operations. However, to achieve digital transformation in the most real sense and get the best results from their BI and analytics initiative, businesses must take BI down to the grassroots level.

Use OBI to Better Align Your Real-World Business Processes

Here are a few examples of the benefits that real-world business users can derive when they apply BI to their day-to-day operational data:

• Retail organizations can use vendor and consumer data to create better strategies for managing their portfolio of product offerings
• Inventory specialists can better manage current and future stocks by using predictions based on their past stock supply and demand data
• Marketing teams can create more focused ad targeting strategies by better understanding the transaction patterns of their buyers and potential customers
• Pharmaceutical manufacturers can study drug consumption behavior at regional, national, and global levels for better production planning
• Plant managers and production supervisors can utilize data about their specific machinery to facilitate preventive maintenance that is more proactive and cost-effective
• Cash firs in banking institutions can pinpoint and predict the demand of their local ATMs daily
• Information security teams can monitor trends and patterns to help them better predict the next possible attempt of a data breach

Conclusion

Business intelligence isn’t just for technical departments or C-suite executives – BI can and should be leveraged across all roles within an enterprise. Businesses are now empowering their business users to analyze everyday data, as it comes and generates real operational intelligence for their organizations. If you’re ready to improve the day-to-day operations at every level of your business, then it’s time take the right  business intelligence platform to your business users and give them pathways to scientifically manage the data within their processes and take informed decisions, every day.