Due to high levels of ‘competitive advantage seeking’ in the global and local markets, there is no doubt that Business Intelligence (BI) is vital for today’s companies to survive. Any given company’s competition too is busy collecting information on the trade the company is involved in. This leads to the point where businesses, especially operating in major verticals, are unable to stay away from using BI.
Presenting complex data in a simple format brings competitive advantages to corporates that struggle to understand numerous complex metrics. Corporate Finance is one of the most popular BI success stories for gaining a competitive advantage using BI.
BI dashboards have brought complex financials down to simplified views helping financial data to be easily understood and usable among managers of companies. Kingspan Insulation, a manufacturer of building material, used BI and reduced its manual accounting processes greatly and achieved financial consolidation. Due to improved financial data accuracy, accounts began to get balanced, helping the managers to focus on its business activities rather than on accounting. With BI analytics, the Company identified areas of waste effectively and reduced expenses.
Avaya, a global brand in business collaboration and communications used BI analytics and identified ineffective supply chain operations resulting in improved inventory turns exceeding 200%, and reducing its overall supply chain expenditure by half.
Smart decision making – that leads to speed and efficiency- is another competitive advantage that BI gives the businesses. KFC UK used a multitude of spreadsheets to track its delivery fleet and operations and was virtually stuck with an excess of spreadsheets. The variables and drivers for planning sales,from labor requirements down to uniforms were moved from the spreadsheet system and was given to a BI which resulted in an integrated restaurant planning solution fitting KFC’s business requirements ideally. IT later led to less incorrect decision count and smarter decisions by KFC UK.
The increased data flows also require businesses to filter necessary information from large volumes of data most of which may not be immediately relevant for the business and BI can help pick the essential and relevant info for the business from mass and unmanageable volumes. Huge data volumes were an issue faced by National Express Group, a leading transport provider delivering services in the UK, Europe, North Africa, North America and the Middle East. When it began to use a BI called Azure, National Express began gaining insights into vast data from their new ticketing systems and was ready to handle large data volumes for further insights.
Also, businesses can view their own operations holistically and find inefficiencies to be corrected using BI. This fine-tunes their enterprises and processes better by removing inefficiencies and increasing productivity. These insights also help the businesses to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors. The MOL Group, a leading international, integrated oil and gas company from Hungary rolled out their data platform and data visualization tool to four countries they operated and started developing advanced analytics so that all their retail operations in these countries were displayed in a single, holistic, dashboard. This helped MOL Group to save significantly in time and costs in their downstream activities. The BI solution optimized pricing, workforce efficiency and service station location selection as well. Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, the Indian public sector oil and gas company and a Fortune 500 company, was struggling in the face of increased competition, processing 250,000 paper invoices per month and dispersed functions-product planning and purchase, development, manufacturing or service delivery, inventory management as well as sales and marketing. Implementation of SAP BI, increased its operational efficiencies, and brought the supply chain and inventory management systems on to a single platform.
Similar to BI, Market Intelligence (MI) too plays an important role in a business. MI is the practice of gathering data on the marketing efforts of an organization, then analyzing that data to guide the decision-making process of campaigns. It’s used to inform decisions in relation to competitors, products and consumer trends or behaviors. MI therefore requires research of the market and based on available data. Similar to BI, MI also helps to better focus on increasing revenues and profits. MI is equally important as unlike BI, which is internally focused, MI which includes market research, differs from BI in that it is externally focused on competitors, customers and market opportunities. MI drives the company forward in its larger competitive external environment. MI also focuses on another critical aspect that BI does not focus on-new product development. It is MI, based on competitors’ products, pushes the boundaries of innovation of the Company. For instance, the 2015 dual messaging of KFC ‘caring for the community’ and ‘gold-standard quality’ which it highlighted through a transparent TV documentary was based on MI. The TV series won the hearts and minds of KFC customers bossing the Company’s reputation for transparency-and its profits!
In today’s business landscape, businesses in major verticals can turn to be ‘ex-businesses’ without BI and MI. It is no more a question of ‘To-BI or Not to BI’, or ‘To-MI or Not to MI’, but, how fast and how keen the organization is.
