Best Business Intelligence Tools: Features, Rankings, and Analysis

This article provides an overview of the best business intelligence tools, including SAP Business Intelligence, MicroStrategy, Sisense, SAS Business Intelligence, Yellowfin BI, Dundas BI, System, and Microsoft Power BI. It also discusses the key features of business intelligence tools, such as ranking reports, what-if analysis, executive dashboards, interactive reports, operational reports, pivot tables, ad-hoc reports, and user-specific security.

INTRODUCTION
Business intelligence tool is a type of software which is designed to extract the
required data for the purpose of business intelligence. This software generally
reads the information which has been stored in data warehouse. In the period
between 1970 and 1990 the first business intelligence software was developed
by IBM and Siebel. It is a variety of applications which is generally used to
analyse the entity raw data. It generally includes mining of data, online
processing of data, and business reporting. The organization generally uses the
Business Intelligence software to keep record and track of information and
depend on the software with full trust on it. (study.com, 2019)
Best Business Intelligence Tools
Few best Business Intelligence tools are here in below:
a) SAP Business Intelligence
b) MicroStrategy
c) Sisense (Mopinion, 2018)
d) SAS Business Intelligence
e) Yellowfin BI
f) Dundas BI (Mopinion, 2018)
g) System
h) Microsoft Power BI (Mopinion, 2018)
Features of Business Tool
The principal features of a business tool are here in below:
a) Ranking Reports: This is one of the best features as ranking helps to
easily view and analyse the best and worst part from top to toe. The
ranking of any business part can be easily done and one can easily
specify the criteria. (Conrad, 2018)

b) What -If Analysis: If the seniors or the management is concerned about
the future prospects of the company one can easily run the “What -if”
analysis using the relevant past data of the firm to predict the impact of
it in future. The tools allow us to predict the risks and reward associated
with each decision outcome. (Conrad, 2018)
c) Executive Dashboards: It give the senior management of the company a
real time sketch of the organization in the form of graphs, diagram, pie
charts, summary and other reports. This helps the organization to take a
faster and better decision. (Conrad, 2018)
d) Interactive Reports: It also the users to reduce the excess amount of
data collected into many possible ways. Generally, users can derive
benefit of features like statistical analysis and regression to identify the
different trends in data. (Conrad, 2018)
e) Operational Reports: The business intelligence at the end of each day
can provide the management of the entity ,a summary of the daily
transactions and events occurred .It provides them the vital information
necessary to make in decision making purpose. (Conrad, 2018)
f) Pivot Tables: This is a table which can automatically take out important
pata from the huge sets of data. The main function of Pivot table is to
sorting, counting or averaging the data stored and also summarise all the
information in one data. (Conrad, 2018)
g) Ad-Hoc Reports: It is very important feature of the business intelligence
which allow the user to generate their own report without any request
from the income Tax department for the same. (Conrad, 2018)
h) User-Specify Security: If anyone wants to restrict the access to data,
Business Intelligence tools allows the users to restrict the data access to
particular individual or a group of people. (Conrad, 2018)
References
Conrad, A., 2018. 10 Critically Important Business Intelligence Software
Features. [Online]
Available at: https://selecthub.com/business-intelligence/critical-business-
intelligence-features/
[Accessed 4 May 2019].
Mopinion, 2018. Top 15 Business Intelligence Tools: An Overview. [Online]
Available at: https://mopinion.com/business-intelligence-bi-tools-overview/

[Accessed 4 MAy 2019].
study.com, 2019. What is Business Intelligence? - Definition & Examples.
[Online]
Available at: https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-business-intelligence-
definition-examples.html
[Accessed 4 MAy 2019].