What is Business Intelligence?

Hi Folks, after a looong break I am back and will be working on my blog for next one month, over the next few days we will navigate through various aspects of Business Intelligence(BI)- how to enable it, what are the tools/products that Microsoft provides us to enable BI and more importantly the functional and technical aspects of these tools/products in detail.
 
LETS GET STARTED…..

What is Business Intelligence?

“Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the ability for an organization to take all its capabilities and convert them into knowledge, ultimately, getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, via the right channel”.— WIKIPEDIA

Rather than dwelling deep into the above definition let us look into an example that would help us in understanding what Business Intelligence is all about.

QUICKIE-MART is an established supermarket chain, which has its presence across various cities in India.

The management of QUICKIE-MART is very pleased with the growth and planning to expand its business.

However, the management would like to pump in the money into areas where they can see substantial returns.

QUICKIE-MART has an Information-Store which gives them the following inputs:

·         The highest growth margins over the last 3 years have been registered in Gwalior followed by Visakhapatnam and Mangalore.

·         The sales of general groceries like Wheat and Rice has been on lower end whereas the Packaged food items have registered significantly high margin of profits.

·         The sale of Insect repellent products has been high in the months of August to October.

·         The average age of employees of top 5 QUICKIE-MART outlets is between 22-27.

Based on the above facts the management decides to:

·         Open majority of new outlets in Middle-tier cities and prefer to hire more people in the 22-27 age group.

·         Increase the investments in imports of Packaged foods.

·         Introduce discount offers on the Insect repellent products during the off-season months.

 

Let us see how we can relate the QUICKIE-MART Case-study to the above definition.

“Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the ability for an organization(QUICKIE-MART) to take all its capabilities(Transaction details) and convert them into knowledge(Informative data), ultimately, getting the right information(The analysis provided in the example) to the right people(Decision makers of QUICKIE-MART), at the right time(During Investment), via the right channel(Reporting Tools)”