Business Intelligence (BI)
“If business is a war, then BI is the key of the war”
Business intelligence is a set of tools that is used to transform the data gathered from business operation into reliable information that can be distributed to the right people at the right time.
Example of BI usage in the pandemic era is when PPKM that forces several apparel companies to lose profit because there are not many people who buy clothes. Business intelligence can help the owner to create strategy that can help the company to gain profit. Let us assume that the company target consumer are women, firstly he needs to measure how big the market for women apparel. The company can research the potential of people buying apparel from advertising in social media, thus the company starts to advertise their product in specific social media using specific hash tags to gather the attention of customers. In this case, data becomes a very important component in order to have successful Business Intelligence.
BI is required to make better and faster decision as efficient as possible and also to see business operations transparently.
These are several steps that are required in doing Business Intelligence.
Firstly, determining the Methods and Programs. This is done by determining which data mining method we will be using to gather the data, we can use data from specific website, searching in the Google such as Google Trends to understand the current trend, and also through social media advertisement.
Secondly, Data Collection and Structuring. After we gather the data, we structure the data by assigning them as variables. After that we can do descriptive analysis such as measuring how frequent the observation appears by using mode or using average. We can also structure the data by sorting it and grouping the data.
Finally, Convert Into Information. After we gain insight from the data such as the customer segment that often views our product, we can develop the plan for our target market.
BI is important in supporting the business activity, especially in terms of the four pillars of business:
· Marketing: BI can help the company to effectively market their product to the right customer segment and also as indicator to determine the product availability according to the data.
· Production: BI can help the company to determine how much product should be produced according to the customer data, this is important in order for the company to produce efficiently and avoid over-production or even under-production.
· Human Resources: BI is important for evaluating the human resources performance, payroll, giving the right insight to each division to help them coordinate better.
· Finance: BI can be used to report financial statements fast so that company can report to the investors regularly.
Example of Business Intelligence Real Life Case
Figure above shows the implementation of Business Intelligence to understand the most selling product. It shows the number of engagements from social media, we can see from what social media people buy specific products such as the “Kaos Indomie Viral” that buyers are mostly coming from Instagram.
Business Intelligence is useful to help improve the business process, such as:
· Understand and predict consumer behavior and needs
· Improve the business service
· Help prepare new campaigns to offer to the customer
· Targeted campaign according to the behavior of loyal card holder.
