BI Reporting - A Simple Guide To Business Intelligence Reports

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• What is BI reporting?
• The Different Types of BI reporting

Whilst the basics of BI reporting could be understood as aggregating and analyzing large sets of data to provide real-time insights into business operations, there is significantly more that goes into creating a business intelligence with BI-reporting,

One of the key ways in which business intelligence reporting facilitates these insights is through data visualization. It can be difficult to draw conclusions when you’re staring at endless streams of numbers. But when this data is presented clearly, it’s much easier.

By now, everyone has probably already seen the data visualization meme that first gained traction on LinkedIn a few years ago, but it’s still one of the best representations of the strengths of BI reports:

And this is one of the best explanations as to why excel spreadsheets just don’t cut it anymore - BI reporting tools are able to perform these functions instantaneously. The insights offered by  BI reports would require hours of work by a human. 

Once the data is presented, observations can be made about elements of the business such as trends in revenue, employee efficiency, manufacturing productivity, and essentially anything else it is possible to measure.

The extent of BI reporting is limited only by the scope of the data you are able to collect. The insights that BI reporting provides would have been overlooked prior to these processes being facilitated by technology.

Business intelligence reports therefore provide management with a more holistic understanding of their businesses, thus enabling a more strategic approach to decisions affecting the long- or short-term future of the business.

Platforms like the GoSimplo dashboard provide companies with greater insight via data visualization. The platform visualizes business critical financial and performance data that facilitate more accurate decision making for organizations. Try GoSimplo for free today.

The Different Types of BI reporting

So now you understand the basic functionalities of a BI report, it is important to learn that this is just the most elementary of steps of BI reporting. There are a multitude of different types, each with a specific use-case and requiring specific sets of data.

Here, we’ll explore some of the different types of business intelligence report to give you an idea of the type of BI reporting you could be doing…

Performance Management BI Reporting

These BI reports can be useful in providing insight on the performance of individuals, teams, or departments within an organization. These business intelligence reports are especially relevant to senior management, as performance ultimately determines profit.

But this type of BI reporting goes beyond merely financial numbers, taking into account aggregate data that measures a variety of KPIs.

The real-time nature of such reporting allows businesses to implement any necessary changes to their operations before significant damage is caused by poor performance.

But beyond any short-term course-corrections that performance management BI reports afford management, they also contribute to overarching strategic decisions that influence the future of the business. This is because, in many cases, they are able to identify the driving force behind the success of the business.

Is one area of the organization wildly more successful than all the others? Are there elements of the business that should be divested, or invested more heavily into to try to increase productivity? These are the kinds of questions that performance management reporting helps to answer.

Predictive Analytics BI Reporting

Predictive Analytics is a type of business intelligence that takes BI reporting one step further. It provides reliable predictions based on current and historical data. Predictive analytics tools are highly desirable, as they remove a lot of the uncertainty from decision-making.

Whilst this type of BI report is often associated with predicting the outcome of events in the future, it can also be used to determine the likely cause of events that took place in the past, making it an extremely powerful BI reporting tool.

This type of data reporting in business intelligence uses predictive models to discover patterns and relationships in the data that reveal threats and business opportunities. It does this by estimating the statistical probability of a given outcome for a specific decision.

For these reasons, predictive analytics are especially useful to the inexperienced business-owner, who is typically less confident about strategic planning. 

However, they also have many applications for business both large and small, such as customer relationship management, validating legal decisions, and consumer credit scoring.