Your company can have different disparate data sources. The source can be the operational systems, online services, or any existing data mart. The need for a single window to make sense of this data is paramount.
A business intelligence solution helps you with an architecture that connects all such data sources. It allows you to draw a correlation between the different data points and compute a better strategy for your business.
As your business grows, the volume of data that it generates requires data warehousing. In simple terms, a location that acts as a repository and analyzing tool for all your data.
Table of Contents
Software Solutions
For a retail business, a Point of Sale or POS software forms the backbone of its operations. A POS manages the sales, inventory management, and stock tracking of an entity.
The operational systems like an ERP or CRM gather a chunk of data every day.
An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software cuts down your time spent on daily activities. It eases out processes like managing the books. It brings all the data and solutions to one interface and helps you to ease your business operations.
You can find answers to the essential business questions that now remain unanswered. For example, which product line is most profitable, or what is the revenue per product category? By designing the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), ERPs address all such queries.
A CRM tool (Customer Relationship Management) helps you better organize and process customer data. Customer Relationship for any business is the key to compete in any sector. If you do not have a CRM, maintaining large customer databases becomes complicated.
Data Warehousing
As your business volume grows, so does your data from different sources. A data warehouse helps blend data from external systems, transactional sources, and applications.
A data warehouse is a dedicated environment that helps in analytical reporting, data mining, and decision making. It enables the management of large and complex queries. You may have opted for data warehousing, but it might be only a transactional database and not designed for reporting.
Power BI data warehousing is one such solution that helps solve this problem. Your investment in a data warehouse can future-proof your IT investment. It will give you a historical and coherent picture of your business.
These tools, which you use to analyze data, do not treat them as a function to handle data model processes. Such BI (Business Intelligence) tools function as interactive platforms and not as a historical database.
E-commerce Websites & Apps
Technology advancement, digital evolution, and pandemic have led to a change in the online demand for the opted services. There are a host of many e-commerce platforms that ease the transaction of goods and services online.
These websites and mobile applications use matrics, which have a few key variables. These variables have a direct impact on the sales of your products and services. A few of them are:
- Impressions, Reach, and Engagement.
- Email click-through-rate.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA).
- Organic acquisition traffic.
- Social Media Engagement.
- Average Order Value (AOV).
- Sales conversion rates.
- Customer Retention rate.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
The above, in conjunction with other hosts of factors, make the e-commerce ecosystem. The successful management of these can help propel growth for your business.
Social Media Sales
It is the era of content. The affinity towards a particular type of content can help you smartly place your products in the social networking domains.
Some metrics can help you gauge how your brand is doing among the target customers. In-app sales are on the rise. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram allow you to sell products directly to customers.
Social media data mining can increase the return on investment (ROI) manifold for you. The data here refers to how people interact with your social media handles. It uses likes, comments, followers, shares, and hashtags to measure the impact.
Mining the data involves the collection of information about all these variables and gauging consumer behavior. Identifying the path that the consumer follows helps you better define the KPIs.
It saves a lot of marketing money and effort. Data mining gives you a chance to narrow down the target audience and helps to target basis interest, rather than the generic way.
So to drive your business and thurst growth, managing data is the leading area to consider. Using business intelligence to interpret and comprehend data can help in better decision-making. You can grow your business across the different domains and link up all the data sources to one interface to give you a logical picture.
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