You want to make better decisions in less time. You may be thinking about business intelligence implementation. Businesses today are inundated with information. As a result, business intelligence has grown in popularity.
What is business intelligence? Business intelligence helps streamline, simplify and automate data across companies and departments. Business intelligence helps get you information faster so you may make better decisions. There are various tools in the market and they include reporting, dashboards and more.
You may want to know that about 80% of businesses fail at business intelligence implementation. So, why do they fail and how may you avoid it? The main reasons are management, process, and technology for business intelligence.
There are several things that will help you in business intelligence best practices. You want to follow these successful business tips with your bi implementation.
Business intelligence can go a long way toward helping you improve your balance sheet, and these business intelligence implementation tips can help.
A Big Deal: 8 Tips for Business Intelligence Implementation
We’re sharing 8 tips for business intelligence implementation. You will learn how to implement business intelligence successfully. These tips will help you avoid the common pitfalls when it comes to bi implementation.
It is important to point out that the main focus for business intelligence implementation is now improving revenues. You want to have the management team on-board. Your team wants to be clear on the strategy and information you want to see regularly. You want to get insight into your process in key departments and the IT processes behind it.
Before you run and implement a tool, here are 8 tips for business intelligence implementation.
1. Outline Your Goals
If you want your business intelligence implementation to be successful, you want to outline your goals first. Think about what you want to see by the department, by products, and by people.
You want to make a list so when you start looking at demos you are ahead of the curve. How simple do you want the implementation? How long do you want it to take? What is your budget for your business intelligence tool?
2. Look at Your Reporting
Take a look at what you already have with your reporting and tools. This will help give you ideas on what you don’t have and what data isn’t connected. For example, is your inventory connected to your departments? Do you know profitability by an item, by a department? Is the data real-time?
Think about what you have, what you would like to have, and what you must have. Then, walk in with this information when you start looking at demos on business intelligence tools.
3. Think Long-Term
Many of us are conditioned to thinking short-term. This may be month to month cash flow, quarterly earnings, and annual projections. If you want to take your business to the next level, you want to think long-term.
You want the information to guide you long-term. What will the data show you are opportunities to save money? What do you want to know about future opportunities to drive revenue and profitability? This will help focus on the entire management team.
4. Select User-Friendly
With any tool you test drive, you want to select a user-friendly tool. You want to assess if it will fit your team and ask them for feedback. You want tools that will help you make better business decisions faster. At the same time, you want to have the management team buy-in of the tool.
If you don’t select a user-friendly tool, it may be harder to get the team to use the tool. You want the team to use the tool. If you don’t use it, you won’t get the results you want.
5. Plan for Training
You want to think about a plan for training. Will the data all be integrated right away? Could you do the training all at once? Or would it be better to do a department at a time and then do the overall training?
How often will the team communicate on key performance indicators? By when will important decisions be made? Have you created a hierarchy for responsibilities and decision making?
You want the tool to succeed. As a result, the process is important.
6. Identify Metrics
Get clear on the metrics you want to measure and manage. How will you make important decisions if you don’t know what you are looking for? You want to start small with 2-3 metrics and grow perhaps quarterly.
This way it’s simple to measure the data and for everyone to be on board. This will make making decisions from the data easier as well. You want to keep simplicity in mind as you grow. Ideally, you want to view charts that combine no more than 10 key performance indicators typically.
7. Be Consistent
Talk to each department and the management team on creating consistency. You want internal departments to assess their key metrics regularly. You want an overall company meeting consistently as well.
This creates ownership and accountability within each area of the company. If there is miscommunication or roadblocks, assess the metrics and accountability.
8. Stay Accountable
If you want business intelligence implementation to be successful, stay accountable. When you have ownership in the beginning, it’s great. However, where many teams lose their momentum and results, is they lose accountability.
Set a standard of accountability from the start. Then, stay accountable.
8 Tips for Business Intelligence Implementation
These 8 tips for business intelligence implementation will set you up for success. You and your team want to review this and outline your plan.
Business intelligence may be highly valuable by increasing efficiency, teamwork, and revenue. However, a business intelligence implementation may easily falter due to a lack of management ownership, process breakdowns, and the wrong technology.
Take the time you and your team need to select the best tool while creating a sense of urgency with deadlines and accountability.
Check out our blog for more on business intelligence and tools.