11 Jul How to choose a Business Intelligence software?
If you are managing a business, there are strategies and tools, both are indispensable and work together. The Business Intelligence tools or software allow to implement the strategy, transforming the planning of the company into reality.
Through the appropriate functionalities, the managers should be able to quickly and easily access key performance indicators, identify weaknesses to enhance them and proactively manage planning processes.
What is BI?
Before thinking about which BI tool your company should adopt, you must understand what is the strategy known as Business Intelligence. And then, do you know what is BI?
Business Intelligence consists in collecting and analyzing data about a company, generating information that is relevant, or rather crucial, for decision making. These data can be internal (on the flow of production, the efficiency of administrative operations, logistic deadlines) or external (on competitors, the economic scenario, among others).
Now that you know what BI is about, it is much easier to understand what BI tools are: they are resources that allow you to simplify or completely automate the task of collecting data and organize them to make it easier to analyze.
What factors to consider when choosing BI tools?
Of course, you can research and decide which are the best tools available in the market. However, to make a good choice, you must be aware of the following factors:
Speed
Remember that the purpose of Business Intelligence software is to provide information for the strategy, wouldn’t be practical doing it manually due to the time needed to put it into practice. Therefore, it is logical that the faster the tool capable of processing data, the greater its effectiveness.
Stability in performance
You don’t want to run the risk implementing a tool that presents technical issues, the point of finding information without problems to support a decision is important.
Easy to use
The complexity of the tool, from the point of view of the user, can be a barrier. The more difficult it’s to operate the system, the less likely it’s to get the support you need to invest in its implementation. However, even for relatively simpler BI tools, it is recommended that you have a team of collaborators that specialize in your operation.
Cost-benefit
It is important that you look for BI tools that are compatible with your company’s budget. At the same time, they must offer the features and functionality that your company needs.
After analyzing all these key factors and with our experience in BI projects, from Triangle we bet on the Jet Analytics tool, because includes a Data Manager and a Dashboard Builder. The key point is that it integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, allowing to generate Dashboards, fast and flexible financial reports in Excel / Power BI / on cloud. In addition, it provides us with predesigned reports to start using from the first day with our Business Central data.
Data Manager is a back-end solution that allows you to create and maintain data warehouses and OLAP cubes. It contains six predefined cubes built specifically to store data for reports. In general, this component is only installed on a machine and is accessible to people with experience in database or IT administration.
Other types of users, called Designers, can use the Dashboard Builder to create dashboards and display them on different devices or upload them to the cloud, and any person of the company with permission can visualize or work with them.
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