In the middle of the digital age where information is worth gold and its correct analysis can take you to the top, Business Intelligence becomes something completely necessary for small and medium-sized companies, in this blog we explain what Business Intelligence is, its main objective, the advantages that involve using it and a tool to implement it in your company.
What is Business Intelligence?
To understand Business Intelligence (BI) it must be understood that it is not a too specific function, but rather a range of tools, techniques and functionalities. Its main objective is to provide useful information for making strategic decisions.
Note that we are talking about strategic decisions and not operational decisions, the strategic decisions of the company are supported by the information offered by Business Intelligence, as opposed to operational information.
A list of invoices receivable is an example of operational information. That same list requires processing to become information that can be used at a strategic level.
What are the functions of Business Intelligence?
Its main objective is strategic decision-making, for that it needs to fulfill some functions:
Collect information: hard data that is relevant, process it with some criteria.
An objective: normally what you have to do is make a hypothesis.
For example:
In accounts receivable, it is hypothesized that I am not being as efficient as I could with regard to managing the collection of my invoices.
That is the hypothesis with which I am going to work, now I need to convert that hypothesis, which may be intuitive or that may arise from some indicator, to concrete data that confirms it, if the collection management strategy is changed, will I obtain a different result? What is tried is to take the strategic management of what happened decades ago when guided by intuitions to a management based on data (Data-driven decisions), it continues to use experience and intuition to find hypotheses or analysis paths, but we validate those decisions with data that we process to confirm that if we make a change in the way we manage our accounts receivable then we will obtain a different and better result.
If we intuit that offering an incentive to the people who manage our collections will improve the efficiency of collections, then we need to generate information that confirms that this result is going to happen, therefore we can have different strategies to generate that information, record it, collect the results, process them and be able to make comparisons, for example two collection teams are set up in different regions and we offer different incentives, we began to generate data and collect them in statistics to be able to compare them and see if the different strategies to grant incentives to collectors had a correlation with the improvement in the collection and in the profitability of the company .
For this we need tools that allow you to record the data, take it, make calculations, graph it, make reports and verify if what we thought was going to happen really happens or the opposite happens or does not change anything, these are the functions that it has to be able to cover a BI tool.
Advantages of Business Intelligence tools
Data-driven decisions
The fundamental advantage is that decision-making changes from intuitive management to data-based management, which is why it is easier to correct and make adjustments in the direction of the decisions that are being made, because they can be verified, leading to best results.
You will be able to analyze increasingly complex and voluminous data
A BI tool will allow you to analyze a large amount of data, which in this digital age is increasingly necessary for decision-making.
Does Odoo have any BI tools?
It has several, in addition to a specific BI tool, it has others that are normally part of a BI suite. But before talking about it, we must understand that 90% of strategic decisions do not require such complex tools, they can be made with simple statistical charts and graphs.
Odoo aims to solve at least 80% of the strategic decisions that a manager needs to make each month. From past versions, Odoo shows custom reports and dashboards, recently it incorporated calculation templates, one of the most used tools for BI.
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Odoo BI allows you to:
Choose the information or pivot tables found within the system and transfer it to a spreadsheet.
Have the information updated without the need to re-export it, Odoo will simply update the table from which our spreadsheet is based in the system and that's it.
The need to analyze complex and voluminous information is becoming more and more essential, therefore BI tools must be adopted by small and medium-sized companies to ensure a competitive advantage.