If, as a decision-maker, you’re wondering what business intelligence can do for you? You’ve come to the right place!
Business intelligence”, what an impressive word, yet one that’s very simple to understand. It refers to all the tools and processes that will enable you to easily analyze your company’s data.
Indeed, analyzing data has become essential for managing business performance.
But what is business intelligence? What are the advantages for your IT services company?
We’ll explain!
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence is a term that translates into French as “informatique décisionnelle”. At first glance, this term may seem complex, but it’s actually quite simple. It refers to all the tools and processes that will enable you to easily analyze your company’s data.
At that moment, you’re thinking about your dashboards, visualizations, graphs and reports, which you spend hours and hours creating and then studying.
Well, that’s where the magic of BI comes in, as it harnesses your data, on demand, by cross-referencing it to extract value.
Where once you had to enter all your data into your Excel spreadsheet and then consolidate them to obtain results, BI automatically captures data according to your different activities to create reports.
Roughly speaking, the data comes from the various software programs you use and from integrated data.
Business intelligence can be found in many forms: mobile BI, real-time BI, operational BI, cloud BI, SaaS BI, open source BI, enterprise reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), data analysis and collaborative BI.
How does Business Intelligence work?
The data is stored in what we call a “datamart” or “datawarehouse”. This may be historical data or data that has just been integrated. These data will be consolidated to form indicators that will be presented in a report. This will take the form of a table and/or graph and will answer the following questions:
- “What happened? “,
- “Why did this happen? “,
- “What’s going to happen? “,
- “What’s happening right now? “,
- “What should happen? “.
What are the benefits of business intelligence for your IT services company?
Whether you’re a large, medium-sized or small digital company, BI can help you manage your business. Why do you need BI? because data is the foundation of a company’s development and the essence of strategic decision-making.
As mentioned above, BI correlates different data, enabling you to analyze results and make the right decisions. The strength of this tool lies in the fact that the data is almost or completely real-time.
The reports produced by BI enable you to track your Key Performance Indic ators (KPIs). In addition to the classic indicators of costs, expenses, revenues and therefore profitability, you can also create your own decision-making indicators.
This naturally leads to greater responsiveness in your business management, and in the monitoring of your customers and activities.
Your ability to analyze your market, its trends and your positioning will give you a competitive edge.
In short, having BI allows you to
- A more precise and relevant reporting tool.
- Eliminate human error by automating data collection, consolidation, modeling and retrieval.
- Automate your reporting.
- Help you make decisions, and save time in the decision-making process.
ERP and Business Intelligence
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) enables data to be centralized via a single information system, accessible to all ESN functions: sales, HR, CFO, sales, etc.
By becoming a link in a single chain, ERP and business intelligence can reinforce the decision-making system.
ERP becomes a source of data for BI and meets the reporting needs of decision-makers.
By centralizing the database, other functions within the service company also have access to the information.
Where previously, each business line analyzed the data linked to its own activity, the ERP-BI pair enables data from the correlation of all the company’s activities (customer relationship management, invoicing management, human resources, etc.) to be exploited.
In this way, Business Intelligence will combine several pieces of information integrated within the ERP system and deliver them at the right time: invoicing, purchase orders, payment, etc.
This process will enable us to carry out predictive analyses, adapt strategies and better understand customer and employee needs.
VSA: a well-priced solution
There are many tools available to exploit Data. So you need to identify the one that suits you best.
VSA’s SaaS ERP offers business-oriented Business Intelligence with KPI’s useful to service companies (ESN, SSII) and consulting firms. Numerous reports combining tables and graphs are available in each software module (recruitment, HR, CRM, business, activities, sales, invoicing, purchasing, finance, etc.).
VSA offers you “real-time” reporting to facilitate your decision-making without any time lag in data processing.
For example, with the help of operational, sales and recruitment indicators, you’ll be able to optimize your resources and make the most of your business: missions and projects; and on the administrative side, you’ll have an overview of all your validation and invoicing processes to analyze, in particular, outstanding amounts and customer payment deadlines, in order to implement appropriate solutions (reminders, factoring, etc.).
Conclusion on business intelligence at the heart of ESNs
Data is at the heart of the enterprise. A good visualization of your data allows you to implement the most appropriate strategy for your situation.
Combined with a tool such as ERP, business intelligence makes it possible to set up a more precise and reliable decision-making process.
In fact, all historical data integrated into the ERP database will feed into the reporting process.
The decision-making process within the IT services company is therefore faster, higher quality and even predictive.
