Introduction to BI

Business Intelligence (BI)

• “BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right
people so that they can take the right decisions”
– Nic Smith, Microsoft BI Solutions (Marketing)

• BI leverages software and services to transform data into actionable

insights that help organizations take informed and strategic business
decisions.
• BI tools access and analyze datasets and present analytical findings
using reports, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps to provide users
with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.
What does BI do?

Excel files
CSV files Takes raw data from a
SQL Server data source
Text files

Data cleaning Transforms raw data into

Removing irrelevant data usable data

Tables
Utilizes usable data to
Graphs
make reports and
KPIs
visualizations
Maps
Business Intelligence Vs. Business Analytics
Business Analytics (BA) Vs. Business
Intelligence (BI)

• Purpose: BI uses historical data to determine what happened within an organization, while BA
uses this data to determine why those things happened in an attempt to make predictions. In
other words, BI provides descriptive analysis of data and BA provides predictive analysis.

• Usage: BI is typically used to understand business operations to determine how past processes
affect key performance indicators (KPI). BA, on the other hand, uses data to determine why
processes affected the KPIs in such a way and to help build models to predict how changes
will affect them going forward.

• Tools: BA tools are often more mathematically advanced than BI tools, as BA involves
statistical analysis and complex processes like machine learning.

Source: https://www.stitchdata.com/resources/business-intelligence-vs-business-analytics/#:~:text=Usage%3A%20BI%20is%20typically%20used,will%20affect%20them%20going%20forward.
 Example 1
Assume that you sell homemade jewelry
 BI provides helpful reports
of the past and current
state of your business.
 BI tells you that sales of
your blue feather
earrings have spiked in
NCR in the past three
weeks.
 As a result, you decide to
make more blue feather
earrings to keep up with
demand.
through an online store.
 BA can answer the question: “Why did sales of
blue feather earrings spike in NCR?”
 By mining your website data, you may learn that a
majority of traffic has come from a post by a
fashion blogger who wore your earrings.
Which
 This insight helps you decide to send
type of BA
complimentary earrings to a few other prominent
fashion bloggers. is this??
 You can also use the previous sales information to
 anticipate how many earrings you will need to make
 determine how much supplies you will need to
order to keep up with demand
Example 2

Problem: Employee Turnover

• Which departments have the highest

turnover?
• Why turnover is high?
• What times of year do employees
• Predicting turnover intention of an
typically quit?
employee
• Are they going to other companies or
going back to school?
Case Studies: Real-World Examples of BI

Source: https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-
strategy/business-intelligence-examples.shtml
Baylis & Harding: BI Provides Decision Making
Process Support

Baylis & Harding is a wholesale distributor specializing in world-class gift sets found in major and
independent resellers.

• Challenge: The company needed to give managers and executives greater visibility into financial,
customer and sales data to make better decisions and expand the business.

• Solution: Managers and executives used business intelligence tools to create standard and ad hoc
reports

• Results: Company executives and managers now have instant access to the business data they need
to act proactively. They can create custom dashboards with KPIs relevant to their areas of focus
and share the goals and performance details with their teams without having to request a custom
report from IT.
Sabre Airline Solutions: BI Accelerates
Business Insights
Sabre Airline Solutions provides booking tools, revenue management, web and mobile itinerary
tools, as well as other technology, for airlines, hotels and other companies in the travel industry.

• Challenge: The travel industry is remarkably fast paced. And Sabre's clients needed advanced
tools that could provide real-time data on customer behavior and actions.

• Solution: Sabre developed an enterprise travel data warehouse to hold its enormous amounts of
data. Sabre executive dashboards provide near real-time insights in user-friendly environments
with a 360-degree overview of business health, reservations, operational performance and
ticketing.

• Results: The scalable infrastructure, graphic user interface, data aggregation and ability to work
collaboratively have led to more revenue and increased client satisfaction.
New York Shipping Exchange: BI Reduces IT
Dependency

New York Shipping Exchange (NYSHEX) is a shipping-technology company working to improve the process of
shipping overseas.

• Challenge: To make sense of overall company performance, NYSHEX would manually extract data from its
proprietary application and various cloud apps and then import it into Excel. This was a laborious process
and few people had access to the data, and most of the requests for reports fell on the engineering team to
execute.

• Solution: NYSHEX invested in BI, centralized its data into one system and gave the entire company access
empowering those with no coding knowledge to dive deep into analysis.

• Results: Thanks to business intelligence and other efforts, in 2019, the company more than tripled its
volume shipping between Asia and U.S.
Indraprastha Apollo Hospital

• They use SQL and Microsoft Power BI tools for providing

operational/financial/clinical insights / information to the Management,
Finance departments and Consultants
• For more information: https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-indraprastha-
apollo-hospital-overcame-initial-roadblocks-to-develop-a-successful-
analytics-strategy/
 More Examples:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-in/what-is-business-intelligence/
Benefits of BI

Think….???
Benefits of BI

• Single point access to data

• Timely solutions
• Improved internal communication
• Improved operational efficiency
• Accurate tracking of sales, marketing, and financial performance