Your company has data, and lots of it. Data tells you what your customers are buying, what your sales trends are, where your inventory is, what your profits and losses are, and more. Or rather, your data would tell you all these things, if only you could take that huge pile of facts and figures and make sense of it.

Welcome to the world of business intelligence. Business intelligence, also known as BI, describes the tools and technologies that help you understand your data. Business intelligence is vital for any business looking to excel in today’s rapidly evolving business environment. Business intelligence provides your business with up-to-date information about its past, present, and future by turning large amounts of jumbled data into key summaries and detailed reports that can guide critical business decisions.

Business intelligence includes functions such as reporting, analysis, and data mining, and one of the easiest and fastest ways to gain insight into your data is to use a business intelligence software solution that will allow you to collect detailed data and generate BI reports for internal and external use.

A business intelligence reporting tool can give you the ability to:

– Locate company data quickly
– Connect multiple different data sources quickly and easily, and define the relationships between data sets, no matter how intricate.
– Locate specific data using a very easy to use interface
– Select data in a narrative style, which is natural for an individual’s approach to focus on the desired data
– Present metadata as you want it to be displayed and described
– Display selected data in a spreadsheet with critical numbers represented by an indicator in a sum cell for each row
– Generate reports on your schedule that can be delivered to multiple people in a variety of ways

Business intelligence reports come in many forms, depending on the reporting software you use. Some programs allow you to create graphical tools such as charts, gauges, and dashboards that update automatically to display up-to-date information that is easy and quick to understand. Some of these reporting software packages allow you to drill down into your information using sophisticated tables. Additionally, they may include the ability to include external information, for example, growth and economic trends. This will give you a better understanding of how market forces affect your results.

While business intelligence reporting tools vary in cost and capabilities, they all have one thing in common: the goal of providing your business with the information it needs to thrive in today’s competitive environment.