Strategic and Operational Benefits of Business Intelligence Systems

This report provides a comprehensive overview of business intelligence (BI), defining it as a collection of technologies and practices used to collect, integrate, analyze, and present business-related information for improved decision-making. It highlights the strategic benefits of BI, such as removing guesswork by providing accurate information, enabling quick responses through faster access to data, developing efficiency by consolidating information in graphs and charts, and improving inventory management with timely order placement. The report also explores the operational benefits of BI, including enhanced reporting capabilities, performance management through goal tracking, data visualization for easy understanding, data mining for processing vast amounts of information, high performance through careful examination of performance areas, and facilitating operational changes for increased efficiency and profitability. Furthermore, the report illustrates the application of BI in various industries, such as retail for inventory management and understanding customer wants, sports for on-field sensors and player drafting, and telecommunications for identifying potential fraud users. The document is available on Desklib, a platform offering a range of study tools for students.

Running head: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Table of Contents
1. Introduction:..............................................................................................................2
2.1 Strategic Benefits...........................................................................................................2
2.2 Operational benefits.......................................................................................................5
Application of Business Intelligence in the retail store:......................................................8
Application of Business Intelligence in sports:...................................................................9
Application of business intelligence in telecommunication:.............................................10
4. Conclusion and research contribution:..........................................................................11
References:........................................................................................................................12

2BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
1. Introduction:
Business intelligence is defined as a collection of applications, technologies and practices
to collect, integrate, analyse and present the business related information (IşıK, Jones and
Sidorova 2013.). The main purpose of the business intelligence is to collect data and analyse
those data to make better decisions in the organization. Business intelligence helps in forecasting
the future of the organization and how the present operation can affect the future of the
organization. BI provides a historical, present and predictive image of the business operations. BI
analyses those data’s and then transfer them into summaries, graphs, charts, reports, maps and
dashboards to help the user with detailed information about the position of the business (Stodder
2013).
2.1 Strategic Benefits
Nowadays the companies are investing a lot of money to establish the business
intelligence in their organization to get ahead of their rivals. Strategic management helps the
organization and the in making better and accurate decisions. Apart from this, business
intelligence provides many strategic benefits and they are:
 Removes guesswork: There are many organizations that treat the business like gambling.
The executive are left with the choice of either guessing or trust their gut feelings. When
the future of the organization is highly dependent on the executives guesswork will not
work and the strategy that will be made will fail horribly. Guesswork comes when the
company does not have sufficient information and there is lack of research in the
organization (Baarendse, Winstanley and Vanderschuren 2013).

3BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
With the help of the business intelligence the organization can get accurate
information, latest updates and the trends in the market. It helps in strategic decision
making by analyzing the past, present and the future of the organization (Chang 2014).
 Helps in quick response: It is necessary in the organization that the decision making
process should be quick and accurate. The business intelligence users can get the answers
to their queries quickly which reduce delay in the operational process. BI helps in making
decisions without searching books, journals and other files and saves a lot of time which
can be utilized in some other productive work (Waller and Fawcett 2013).
 Develop efficiency: There are many companies who spend a lot of time in searching the
information which is needed by them, thus it reduces the working hour. Many times the
employees search for the information and they do not get the exact information that is
required by them. If they get the information they need to transfer the information into
graphs or charts, which again take a lot of time and these decreases the efficiency of the
worker and also affect the productivity of the organization. With the help of the business
intelligence the employee can get all the information at one place and all the information
will be shown in graphs or chats for making understanding the information easily. This
reduces the research time and the employee can focus on the other areas (Rausch, Sheta
and Ayesh 2013).
 Better inventory management: The business intelligence software helps in the making
the right order for the inventory at the right time. This helps the organization to avail
goods all the time for the customer when they need them and the organization doesn’t
have to take the burden of storing excess stock in the inventory (Stone and Woodcock
2014). Business intelligence helps in fulfilling the stock and alerts the management. If the

4BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
organization failed to provide the right product at the right time then the customer can
switch to another company and can lose the employee form the organization.
Strategic benefits Summary
Removes guesswork
There are many organizations that treat the
business like gambling. The executive are left with
the choice of either guessing or trust their gut
feelings.
With the help of the business intelligence
the organization can get accurate information, latest
updates and the trends in the market.
Helps in quick response
BI helps in making decisions without searching
books, journals and other files and saves a lot of
time which can be utilized in some other productive
work.
Develop efficiency
With the help of the business intelligence the
employee can get all the information at one place
and all the information will be shown in graphs or
chats for making understanding the information
easily.
Better inventory management
The business intelligence software helps in
the making the right order for the inventory at the
right time. Business intelligence helps in fulfilling

5BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
the stock and alerts the management.
Fig. Summary table
(Source: Author)
2.2 Operational benefits
Business intelligence has a number of operational benefits as well, which helps in making
the business operations more effective. The operational benefits of the business intelligence are:
 Reporting: Business intelligence helps in collecting and analyzing the data. Business
professional can produce reports on a different data sets for example, staffing, expenses,
operation processes and customer satisfaction. The unique benefit of the business
intelligence is that the information is accurate and relevant to the topic (Chowdhury et al.
2014).
 Performance management: Business intelligence helps in setting different
organizational goals for example target delivery on time, sales goals and also helps in
tracking the progress of the goals on a daily basis. This process of tracking the
performance of the team is known as performance management (Aguinis 2013). It helps
in attempting the goals and the objective in most effective and easy way. The
professional can track the fulfillment of the goals and dependent on that can track the
overall productivity of the organization.
 Visualization: Operational reports can sometimes be very complex to understand or
interpret, which reduces the employee’s ability to recognize and act on the key areas. The
key advantage of using the business intelligence that the software possesses excellent

6BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
data visualization, ensuring correct data collections, which are easy to understand and to
interpret. This software will help to improve the operation of the business.
 Data mining: Business intelligence tools are suited for data collection and process
mining. Business intelligence analyses, processes and then renders a vast amount of
information and data which is impossible to manage with the help of weaker programs.
The software integrates with the in-house database, structured and unstructured data and
provides an effective way of controlling the business environment (Larose and Larose
2014).
 High performance: Business intelligence helps in tracking large amount of data, which
is generated by the organization and then examine those carefully for different
performance areas like sales figures, marketing costs and efficiency (Katzenbach and
Smith 2015). The top management of the organization are kept informed all the time
about the performance and the status of different components and helps to understand the
collaboration of the various business units. It helps the company in the continuous search
of the opportunity that they can grab in the market to expand their business.
 Operational changes: Business intelligence has turned many small and large scale
businesses to change and become more efficient and have also helped them to increase
the profit of the organization. However, business intelligence cannot be effective without
incomplete data. The quality and the volume of the data play an important role in
deciding the success of the business intelligence project. If an organization decides to
work or implement the business intelligence project, then the organizations have to make
many changes in the daily workflow.

7BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Operational benefits Summary
Reporting
Business professional can produce reports on a
different data sets for example, staffing, expenses,
operation processes and customer satisfaction.
Performance management
It helps in attempting the goals and the objective in
most effective and easy way. The professional can
track the fulfillment of the goals and dependent on
that can track the overall productivity of the
organization.
Visualization
The key advantage of using the business intelligence
that the software possesses excellent data
visualization, ensuring correct data collections,
which are easy to understand and to interpret. This
software will help to improve the operation of the
business.
Data mining
Business intelligence tools are suited for data
collection and process mining. Business intelligence
analyses, processes and then renders a vast amount
of information and data which is impossible to
manage with the help of weaker programs.
Business intelligence helps in tracking large amount

8BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
High performance
of data, which is generated by the organization and
then examine those carefully for different
performance areas like sales figures, marketing costs
and efficiency.
Operational changes
Business intelligence has turned many small and
large scale businesses to change and become more
efficient and have also helped them to increase the
profit of the organization.
Fig. Summary table
(Source: Author)
Application of Business Intelligence in the retail store:
Business intelligence if used effectively can help the retail stores and the retail industry to
enhance the customer experience and can also help in managing many operations in the
organization. Managing the inventory is one of the important areas in the retail store. The
business intelligence software helps in tracking the inventory and restoring the inventory in time.
This helps the retail to store to avail the products whenever the customer wants. Retail stores
with less warehouse space uses the business intelligence, which reduces the burden of extra
warehouse spacing. In the 21st century the demand of the customer have skyrocketed and there
are different kinds of customer wanting different products, business intelligence helps in
understanding the wants of the customer, the trends and the change in the global economic
market. Business intelligence helps in differentiating their products from the customer. The

9BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
software helps the organization to understand what can be done so that the organization gets the
competitive advantage over their rivals. The business intelligence helps in the resource
optimization. Business optimization means to integrate all the financial data to manage and
control the operation costs and then optimizing the business performance to get a better
profitability. BI also helps to track and forecast the past, present and future operations that will
affect the operation of the business. The organization can make or adopt changes according to
that.
Application of Business Intelligence in sports:
Business intelligence can provide a number of advantages in the field of sports.
Some of the uses of the business intelligence in the field of sports are:
 On-field sensors: The on-field sensors are recently used in the cricket, football and other
sports. These sensors help in tracking different activities in the field (Walker et al. 2016).
Organization are using different methods to collect the data such as radio frequency
identification that helps in tracking the movement, distance, speed and other different key
factors of the game. These information can be used during the match to inform the
coaches about the condition of the player or can be used later to make strategic decisions.
 Wearable technologies: Wearable technologies such as heartbeat tracker can help the
trainer and the player to stay conscious about their fitness target and their progress. The
wearable technologies can also help in understanding, tracking, preventing and detecting
the injuries that may happen at any time in the field (Duking et al. 2016).
 Helps in drafting: Business intelligence helps in drafting better team in sports. For
example in football, business intelligence is used by different football teams like

10BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Barcelona, Real Madrid to draft a strong team. The teams record the efficiency and the
accuracy of the players and then choose the players.
Application of business intelligence in telecommunication:
Business intelligence can also help in the telecommunication industry in various ways.
Business intelligence can be helpful in identifying the potential fraud users. Business intelligence
can also help in detecting the attempts of the fraudulent entry and can stop the hackers. Bi can
help in the fault identification which will ultimately improve the customer service. The
telecommunication industry can also help in predicting the fault in the networks. It can help the
organization to identify and compare the data traffic, which will lead towards better service. The
resource management can be effective with the help of the business intelligence (Fan, Lau and
Zhao 2015).

11BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
4. Conclusion and research contribution:
Business intelligence is defined as a collection of applications, technologies and practices
to collect, integrate, analyse and present the business related information. Business intelligence
can provide many operational and strategic benefits that will help the organization to manage
more effectively. Business intelligence when used in the retail industry, sports and the
telecommunication industry then the companies will be highly benefited. Using the business
intelligence in the retail store can enhance the customer experience. BI when used in the field of
sports helps in tracking the fitness level of the players and helps in providing other valuable
statistics. Using the BI in the telecommunication industry reduce the fraudulent.
This research helped to understand how the organization can be benefited by the use of
the business intelligence. It will help many organizations to effectively handle their operations
for example it will help in managing the inventory, taking effective decision and quick decisions.
Organizations can invest on implementing the business intelligence in the organization, which
will help them to grow and become successful in the industry