What is Business Intelligence (BI) and why your company needs it

When you have an important decision to make, do you look at the numbers or go with your gut? If the answer is your gut, or a spreadsheet nobody has updated since last month, this article is for you.

What Business Intelligence (BI) is

BI is the set of tools and practices that turns scattered data into information you can act on. In practice, it’s a dashboard that shows you, always up to date:

• which products sell the most;
• where your customers come from;
• where the money is going;
• which monthly targets you’ve already hit.

BI isn’t just for big companies

That idea belongs in the past. Today, the businesses that gain the most from BI are small and mid-sized ones, precisely because they have less room for error.

Without BI, it’s common to:

• find out about a problem weeks after it started;
• spend hours stitching together reports from different systems;
• decide based on “I think” instead of “the numbers show”.

With BI, you:

• follow the business almost in real time;
• get an alert when something goes off track;
• answer questions about the company in seconds.

How it works in practice

A BI tool like Linka BI connects to the data sources you already use (spreadsheets, ERP, sales system, online store) and builds the dashboards automatically.

A common example: a store with three locations

Before: every Monday, the owner logged into three systems, exported reports, merged everything in Excel and only then could see how the three stores were doing together. It took about two hours a week.

After: a single dashboard shows all three stores side by side, always up to date. He opens it on his phone whenever he wants and decides on the spot.

Which numbers to track

It depends on the business, but these show up almost everywhere:

• Finance: revenue, average ticket, late payments and cost per sales channel.
• Sales: conversion rate, number of proposals and average time to close a deal.
• Operations: service time, team productivity and cost per order.

Start with just a few metrics. Five numbers you actually follow are worth more than fifty nobody looks at.

Linka BI

Linka BI is ScaleCode’s business intelligence platform, built for small and mid-sized businesses. It connects to the most common data sources and builds dashboards around the reality of your business.

You don’t need a technical team to use it, or a spreadsheet to feed it.

Want to see it in action? Get in touch and ask for a demo.