These are the 6 steps you need to take to set up your Business Intelligence platform
Business Intelligence is about collecting, analyzing and visualizing data to make better decisions for your business. This includes goals, strategy, growth and investments.
For example, if you want to know how your company’s sales performance relates to finance, you need data from both departments, and it makes life easier if this data is aligned. To get the most out of your data and achieve valuable insights and improvements in your business, it is advisable to set up a BI platform. Below we describe the 6 steps you need to take to set up your Business Intelligence platform:
1. Setting goals
The starting point is of course knowing what you want to achieve. Do you want more customers, more revenue, get more out of your team, or get everyone on the same page in your company?
Its also important to determine who will use this data and what specific information they need for management purposes. In the end, Business Intelligence is tailor-made and every company is different, so the more specific the goals are set, the more you can eventually get out of it for your business.
2. Setting up a data strategy
To achieve your goals, you want to set up your Data infrastructure in the most effective way possible. You decide:
- Which tools you use for data warehousing, like Azure, AWS, or Google Bigquery
- Which tools for dashboarding, like POWERBI, Qliksense, Looker or Tableau
Afterwards, you decide your starting point. Which data is most important to integrate first to achieve the goals, and which data integrations follow afterwards.
Setting up a strategy can be done on a single sheet of paper, so it doesn’t have to be complicated. However, it is important to start with the right tools that fit your company’s needs.
3. Collecting the data
Collecting data starts with determining all the data sources. All this data is a treasure trove of information, provided they match each other well. The right BI tools also need to be chosen and connectors need to be created to link the various data sources to the data warehouse. More about the different connectors can be found here. The choice of BI tools depends on the goals.
4. Data Integration
We start with loading the data. The data sources are linked to the data warehouse and the data is collected, cleaned, securely stored, and structured. These steps create a SSOT (Single Source of Truth), which means that the data you will visualize later is based on the truth.
5. Creating reports and dashboards
To get the right insights, you can analyze, build reports, and visualize data in a dashboard. Your dashboard includes all the data from your different departments, both real time and historical data. This allows you to make predictions, discover correlations, draw conclusions, and make decisions.
6. Improvements and KPIs
With the findings you have made based on the information from your dashboard, you know which improvements you can apply, where you need to save, and where there is more potential. Eventually, you can define KPIs based on this and set the improvements in motion!
NucleusBI helps companies gain insight into their business through the use of data. This helps our customers grow, save costs and make their departments more efficient.
We are more than happy to explain how we can help your company grow datadriven. Please contact us or book a call with one of our BI experts directly.
