Real-life business intelligence examples

Financial services

Business intelligence was utilized by a sizable financial institution in the UK to link all of its data sources, allow business users and IT workers to create reports and BI solutions, and increase the organization’s responsiveness and agility. Only a few departments now employ BI technologies to boost productivity, including customer support, online banking, and branch staffing.

Health

CareLinx works with protected health information to assist the families who utilize their product (PHI). They require a BI solution that complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act since PHI is critical (HIPAA).

Over 300,000 in-home carers are available to families through the national in-home care network CareLinx. They have raised their profile recently by forming alliances with organizations like AARP and Aetna. They needed to deploy a compliant business intelligence system in order to take their next step toward expansion and improve their ability to service clients.

Manufacturing

A significant manufacturing company in the US implemented a cloud-based business intelligence solution that provided advanced analytics while balancing governance and autonomy in report generation. While offering IT more control over how and where data is kept, accessed, and maintained, the cost-effective solution maintains the self-service philosophy.

Security

A cybersecurity website called Bugcrowd links its users with security analysts to find flaws in software and hardware. They had recently closed $30 million in Series D funding, and they’ve assisted many Fortune 500 organizations in shoeing up their security. Additionally, Bugcrowd’s use of BI has enabled them to take the lead in their sector.

Artificial Intelligence

A platform for artificial intelligence used in businesses called DataRobot created the field of automated machine learning. They have just announced a $206 million Series E fundraising round, which is used by one-third of the Fortune 50 firms. Why would a business intelligence tool be required by such a prestigious company? It seems that quite a bit.

News and Infographics

A social media platform called Reddit concentrates on gathering news and fostering community dialogue. It presently holds the seventh spot on Alexa’s list of the Top Sites in the United States, and its capacity to monetize that traffic depends on its business intelligence.

Business Intelligence (BI) reveals information that can be used to inform strategic choices. Tools for business intelligence evaluate both recent and historical data and display insights in simple visual representations. Any application that is crucial to managing your firm is referred to as a business application. Large line-of-business systems and specialized tools are both possible types of business applications. Take into account every program, including branded off-the-shelf items, specialized third-party systems, and in-house built systems, that run on either client computers or servers.

Importance of Power BI as a Business Application

Any program that aids organizations in measuring or boosting their productivity are generally referred to as a business application. This phrase is frequently used in both large enterprises and smaller businesses. In reality, a lot of individuals frequently upgrade their older software. Modernizing the equipment used to achieve different goals is undoubtedly an element of technical advancement. Making business applications operate and updating them is crucial. Large mainframe computers are used to handle the most time-consuming tasks, like factory accounting and bank check processing. Today, however, similar activities can be easily handled by corporate apps. It will speed up the production process and significantly reduce costs.

Some of the particular advantages that firms have while utilizing BI include:

1. Improved operational process effectiveness.
2. Understanding of consumer behavior and shopping trends.
3. Accurate monitoring of financial, marketing, and sales results.
4. Clearly defined benchmarks based on recent and historical data.
5. Instant notifications of data abnormalities and client problems.
6. Real-time, cross-departmental sharing of analyses.

How business intelligence works

Business intelligence uses four essential steps to convert raw data into understandable insights that can be applied by everyone in the firm. Data collection, analysis, and visualization—the first three—lay the groundwork for the ultimate decision-making stage. Organizations previously performed a large portion of their analysis manually, but BI technologies automate many of the procedures, saving businesses time and labor.

Step 1: Assemble and modify data from several sources

To develop collections of dashboards, reports, datasets, and paginated reports, colleagues can work together in workspaces. 

To combine structured and unstructured data from many sources, business intelligence solutions often employ the extract, transform, and load (ETL) method. In order for programs to quickly evaluate and query it as a single comprehensive data set, this data is then redesigned and converted before being stored in a central location.

Step 2: Find patterns and discrepancies.

Automation is frequently used in data mining, also known as data discovery, to swiftly analyze data to detect patterns and anomalies that offer insight into the health of a business at the time. Data modeling and analytics, such as exploratory, descriptive, statistical, and predictive, are frequently included in BI solutions and allow users to better analyze data, identify trends, and generate suggestions.

By choosing the Transform data option on the Home tab of Power BI Desktop, as illustrated in the figure below, you can start Moulding your data and launch Power Query Editor.

Or while loading the dataset, click on Transform Data as shown below:

The Power Query Editor window would be opened as follows:

When we use the Power Query Editor, the query automatically follows your instructions each time it connects to the data source, making sure that the data is always shaped in the way that you specified. Power Query Editor only modifies one particular view of your data, so you can be guaranteed that no changes are being made to the original data source.

Step 3: Visualize data to present findings.

Data visualizations are used in business intelligence reporting to make findings simpler to grasp and disseminate. Interactive data dashboards, charts, graphs, and maps are some of the reporting techniques that let people see what’s happening in the company right now.

Step 4: Take immediate action in response to insights.

Companies can take swift action after gaining insights by viewing recent and historical data in relation to business activity. Real-time adjustments and long-term strategic changes that address supplier concerns, address customer issues, address market movements, and eliminate inefficiencies are made possible by business intelligence.