Business Intelligence

28 May 2021 09:33

 Understanding business intelligence (BI)

○ What is BI?
 Amount of data collected by companies is increasing everyday
 Expectations that findings and recommendations are data driven
 Insights from the data collected by companies is "Business Intelligence"
 Empower clients to transform business
 Components of BI
 Big data
 Dashboards
 Forecasting
 Predictive analytics
 Data visualisation
□ Tableau
□ Cognos
□ SAP
 As consultants, finding must be backed up by evidence
 More specifically data driven evidence
 Definition - process of drawing critical insights from data to inform decisions
 Concept of BI has been around for more than a century
 BI used as part of business language since the 90s
 BI helps answer key questions
□ Whats driving my business today?
□ Emerging trends to be aware of
□ Reasons for these emerging trends
□ What happens if client doesn’t intervene? - PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
 Helps make decisions about
□ Discontinuing goods and services in certain sectors
□ Expanding operations due to demand
 By using BI, establish Key Performance Indicators KPI
 Help back up findings about certain business research
○ Gathering Business Needs
 BI can be overwhelming given the amount of data at fingertips
 Volume of data stored is doubling every 2 years
 Makes solving business problems even more challenging
 FOCUS on "information that will help solve the problem"
 Considerations when solving with Business Intelligence
□ Clients decision making needs
□ Relevant data and information
□ Exactly what the problem needs solving
 Example
□ Assess commercial viability of an existing product
 Does this product align with the organisation's growth strategy
 What data relevant to calculate product's commercial viability
 Where the data can be sourced from
◊ Robust database for product information?
 Information requirement brief
□ Statement of business operations
□ Overview of problems
□ KPIs
□ Data needed
 Not all data available
Profiling the business

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 ○ Profiling the business
 Business model understanding very important
 Business model describes how a business operates, generates income and
manages costs
 Example
□ e-commerce business
 Profitability problem
 Before exploring data, take time to understand the business model
 Build a profile of the organisation
 What the business does?
◊ Products sold
◊ Further details - high end products sold relying on high margins,
low sales
 Who customers are?
◊ People with high disposable income
 Who are the competitors
 What is the competitive differentiator or Unique selling point
 Does the business understand price sensitivity?
◊ Impact of altering prices on sales
 Insider intuition data
◊ Client's perspective on the profitability problem
 Maybe poor search engine optimisation (??)
 Negative online feedback
◊ Clients view on ongoing threats?
 Increased competition due to ease of business
 Maintain IT compatibility with so many different web
browsers
◊ How the client perceive the organisational culture and strength?
 Once the above typical questions are addressed, can use BI to provide data driven
advice
 Understanding the data
○ Review source data
 Can be a minefield
 BI can come from a number of places
 Example
□ Financial management systems house all the transaction data needed
□ Human resource system identified all the staff performing accounts payable
and receivable work
□ 3rd party data for benchmarking purposes
 Truly define data requirements
□ Basic list of data fields from each data source
□ Include example of how data should be formatted and structured
 Example
□ Information request brief
 How report should be run
◊ Financial years
◊ Accounts paid
◊ Accounts received
 Data fields
◊ Month processed
◊ Transaction ID
◊ Transaction type - payable or receivable
◊ Transaction amount
 Structured format
 Typical data provided

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  Sourcing data very challenging
 Team up with business intelligence analyst or data scientist
 Critical that data is high quality and well structured
○ Data granularity
 Defined as - The lowest level that data can be in a target set
 Analysing data that is too granular can be time consuming and costly
 Key comparisons about accounts
□ Compared with a typical month?
□ Compared with same time last year?
□ Is this in line/out of line with expectations?
 To make analysis easier, data can be plotted in a time-series chart

○ Data Relevance
 Where to start analysing?
 If one is in a situation where he/she overwhelmed with the data, pause and ask!
□ Information relevant?
□ Will the data provide the insights needed to make the wise decision
 Example
□ Review productivity of employees
□ Review timesheets/effort recording system
□ Review efficiency
□ Review distribution of work change - Trend Analysis
 By keeping an open mind on data relevance, meet expectation and exceed them
 Tabling the results
○ Data driven insights
□ "tell me something I don’t know
□ Insights from BI can transform a business
□ Why a problem exists? Root cause of a problem
□ How to improve?
 For an e commerce business, key data are:
□ Customer records
□ Sales orders
□ Inventory
□ Human resources system
□ Financial management system
 Need to know data location:
□ In house
□ In cloud
□ Application programming interface API
 Sales data fields

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  Sales data fields
□ Transaction date and time
□ Customer location
□ Customer age
□ Inbound channel
□ Average time spend on site
□ Product category
□ Product purchased
□ Quantity purchased
□ Transaction revenue
 Above data field provides good benchmark for analysis
 Information brief as discussed earlier
 Perform first pass quality review on data provided
□ Check data is well structured
□ Check data for consistency
 No missing or discrepant data
 Number of tools around to assist with the data analysis
□ Explore the market to see what tools are appropriate
○ Illustrating results
 Trend analysis
 Heat map - conversion rate for page visit to sale of conversion rate
 Funnel charts
 Popular tools
□ Tableau
□ Excel Power BI
□ Cognos
○ Prepare final report
 Business problems to solve
 Re-state why you were hired
□ Re-iterate expertise in industry
 Outline process and methodology followed to unpack the problem
□ Highlight you went about uncovering insights
 Data analysed
□ Where the BI came from
 Tools used to analyse the data and illustrate results
 Share the insights
□ Be broad with the recommendations
 Recommendations for declining product sales
□ Review profit margin
 Competitors offer similar products at lower price
□ Increasing marketing
 Market segmentation - understand where customers reside and how
they make decisions
□ Make decision on whether to keep product on catalogue
 Finish consulting project with a face to face meeting with client
□ Ensure common understanding about insights discovered
□ Share experience working with client
□ Build sustainable relationship with client
 Final report and handover meeting brings all threads of BI together
□ Ties problems to solution
□ Empower clients

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