Business intelligence (BI) reports are essential for companies to gain a better understanding of their performance and make informed decisions. There are three main categories of BI analysis: descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive.
Descriptive reports
provide an overview of past performance and current trends. They often include data points such as customer demographics, sales volume, cost analysis, and market share.Descriptive reports are useful for tracking long-term performance or identifying changes in customer behavior over time.
Diagnostic reports
offer insight into why certain results occurred. These reports can be used to identify gaps in the customer journey, potential areas of risk, or the root causes of problems. Diagnostic reports also allow companies to apply corrective measures and improve performance.Predictive reports
provide information about future performance. They use historical data to make forecasts and predictions about products, services, and customer behaviors.Predictive reports are essential for planning and budgeting. Prescriptive reports suggest a course of action for optimal results. They provide detailed information about customer needs and offer recommendations on how best to meet them. Business intelligence tools enable business users to ask and answer questions on their own when the need arises, turn those questions into interactive data visualizations and reports, and share them instantly with others in their organization. By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the time of the purchase order cycle or the number of suppliers, business intelligence reports allow companies to evaluate the performance of suppliers compared to their competitors. BI is more than just software; it's a way to maintain a holistic, real-time view of all relevant business data.
In some cases, causality and correlation may have been confused and attention has been found to have been focused on the wrong aspect of a company's operations. Business intelligence combines business analysis, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. Beyond the short-term corrections that performance management BI reports offer to management, they also contribute to general strategic decision-making that influence the future of the company. BI reports offer many benefits, from obtaining real-time information on the results of your business operations to sharing data across the organization. In addition to helping decision-making, BI reports also help companies identify new opportunities for growth and improvement.
