The best Business Intelligence (BI) tools help eliminate guesswork and empower you with insightful information. Time is one of your most valuable assets, and cloud BI tools help you save time in making decisions. These powerful tools can also help you save time by avoiding uncalculated choices about your business and giving you back time that you may have lost to recover, which you can instead use to continue building and growing.
One of the cloud BI software benefits garnering much appreciation from business owners and leadership is the ability to make well-informed business decisions in much less time than was required in the past.
Cloud BI software helps guide your decision-making processes by providing deep analysis of your existing sales figures and performance and making predictive models and visualizations about what you can expect in the future of your business. You can apply multiple variables to help understand the impact and make decisions much more confidently when using cloud BI.
Here are 4 important cloud BI functionalities that support savvy business building and confident decision-making across departments.
Real-Time Data
Modern cloud BI systems are much more intuitive and easier for non-IT executives and employees While it could take days or weeks in the past to compile and analyze business data, cloud BI software makes it possible to access real-time data and analytics so you can get clear, deep understanding of your business and make business decisions with more confidence and speed.
Cloud BI solutions can pull, compute, and analyze data in real time, so you always have the most accurate sales figures, inventory, and reporting possible when you log into your system. Historically, analytics programs have run on a time delay, so you would not have access to up-to-the-minute data. Real-time data provided by your cloud BI tool can help you and your teams make well-informed decisions quickly and with confidence.
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Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics
Business analytics tools in cloud BI software can be very instrumental in gathering past and current information about your business so that you can analyze that data and learn more about the best ways to move forward successfully in your business. While this information is extremely valuable, most cloud BI software systems also attempt to predict trends for the future as well through predictive analysis features.
The predictive analysis feature of cloud BI software solutions uses patterns and models based on historical data using data mining and machine learning to create formulas that can be used to predict future outcomes of your business. This helps your business anticipate any problems that may arise and allow you to come up with solutions before it is too late when using cloud BI software.
Prescriptive analytics programs operate much like predictive analytics, but instead of helping you make future decisions for your company, you instead can try to solve current problems. Most top cloud BI tools contain unique algorithms that combine your data in a variety of configurations and help formulate potential solutions based on data findings. Hence, you can make informed decisions using simulated data before potentially making more mistakes when using cloud BI software.
Data Visualizations
Data analysis and reporting are central to understanding your business on a deeper level while looking for areas of concern and opportunity when using cloud BI software. With cloud BI tools, companies of all types and sizes now have access to powerful business intelligence tools that can be used to improve profits and expedite making confident business decisions.
One of the most compelling aspects of cloud BI solutions is the ability to create impactful data visualizations that showcase data with powerful imagery that can improve understanding and reveal new insights by looking at data visually versus simply comparing data in numeric-only formats. In other words, the data visualization feature in your cloud BI software is meant to make the numbers make sense.
Data visualizations are a popular cloud BI software functionality and provide you with a variety of options for creating stunning graphs, charts, maps, and more to breathe life into your data and make it more impactful for your business. This is a practice commonly used by successful companies to always be informed in a way that is not overwhelming and/or hard to comprehend.
Self-Service Cloud BI Tools and Dashboards
Modern BI systems are much more intuitive and easier for non-IT executives and employees to understand and use effectively. There are suites of tools that can be customized and automated to fulfill all your regular reporting needs and these are what are considered self-service cloud BI tools. You can also use cloud BI software solutions to build comprehensive, in-depth reports by pulling from a variety of data sources to make one manageable, useful report also known as a dashboard.
With dashboard generation options, cloud BI tools can be more user-friendly and you will not have to be dependent on an IT staff to generate quick reports whenever necessary. Having constant access to your company's data can help you stay on top of any issues that may arise or even notice positive trends and patterns quickly and enable you to make more similar decisions.
BI software and tools will continue to improve in the future and give companies the ability to analyze the past, present, and future state of their business through robust tools and interfaces designed to enhance business insights.
This cloud BI trend is incredibly significant because as data and analytics become more accessible across all levels of your business, you'll find growing opportunities in data analysis that will enhance every department and benefit your overall business growth strategies immensely.
Understanding the data of your company is paramount to its success and business intelligence solutions give you access to the right type of data to achieve success. All of this sounds great, but where do you get started on your journey to filtering through all the top cloud BI software vendors? Wondering how to know what cloud BI features are most beneficial to your company?
You can start by using our cloud BI Buyer's Guide and compare leading cloud BI systems
Please visit our Business Intelligence software page for a complete list of all the cloud BI solutions we have on offer.
