Leveraging Business Intelligence & Analytics for Strategic Decision-Making

It’s 2019 and some of the buzzwords bouncing around the business world are business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA). To help you better understand these terms and how they can apply to your business – we’ve compiled a list of the must-read articles on the topic. These articles define business intelligence and analytics, the latest trends associated with them and how they work within Acumatica’s ERP software to help organizations make strategic and tactical decisions.

What is the Difference Between Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA)?

For your business to thrive, you need to know what’s working, what’s not and how to improve. That’s where BI and BA come in. Business intelligence (BI) tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports, summaries dashboards, graphs, charts and maps to provide users with detailed intelligence about the current state of a business. Business analytics (BA) tools are used to explore and analyze historical and current data to identify past trends and use that data to prepare for future business climates. BI and BA both offer reporting and analytics – although these are not the same thing. Reporting functions present data and analytics features interpret data. Using BI and BA solutions together, companies are able to assess their current status, prepare for future success and take their business where they want it to go.

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Acumatica’s ERP Business Intelligence & Analytics

Business intelligence and analytics provide tangible methods and tools for handling and making sense of your business data. With Acumatica’s Cloud ERP Software, you can easily put these tools into play for your business. Acumatica leverages BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI to help you aggregate your data from multiple sources, extract actionable information for strategic and tactical decision-making and present it visually to stakeholders.

Automatically aggregating data from different sources

• You are able to combine data from Excel files and applications such as Salesforce (CRM) and Marketo (automated marketing) with Acumatica data to leverage a complete view of your business.

Natural language querying (NLQ)

• You can ask a question in plain language and get the data you need without having to dig through endless reports. Search things like “Which region has the most revenue?” or “which products performed best by region?” and get what you’re after with ease.

Analyzing and creating a visual with Power BI

• You can select the best format for the data and how you need to present it, from data tables to pie charts and more. You can also switch display types and data selections to explore the intelligence buried in the data.

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Top Business Intelligence Trends for 2019

With more and more data at our fingertips, it’s getting harder to focus on the information relevant to our problems and present it in an actionable way. BI experts are constantly innovating to make information more accessible and advantageous to business owners.

Here are a few of the trends to keep an eye on in 2019.

1. Making Analytics Accessible

• BI experts project that in the coming year, more vendors will start bringing data and analysis to the user by embedding them in any application that makes sense. For example, analytics could be embedded into an email conversation in a sophisticated way.

2. Contextualizing Data with Storytelling

• Business owners are starting to realize that dashboards don’t always provide context around the data it delivers. In the future, organizations may need their data to be interpreted and contextualized. This could mean a rise in specialized roles like “data interpreters” or “business data scientists” to do this.

3. Natural Language Querying (NLQ)

• With speech recognition technology in the consumer market, there is an increasing opportunity for voice NLQ in business intelligence. Particularly when it comes to mobile BI. For example, if you’re out in the field and want to ask a question, it’s much more effective to do that with voice. In the coming year, text search interface may begin to be replaced by voice as vendors rethink mobile delivery.

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Read more on why you should choose Acumatica for your reporting and business intelligence.

If the idea of having self-service resources to gain insight into what is – and is not – working for your business sounds good, then contact us at Aqurus Solutions today. Our team is ready and waiting to help you get the most out of your ERP investment.