Business intelligence helps a company make better decisions by understanding what happened and how it happened. It guides planning and execution by showing key business metrics and how they are progressing.
The quantity of data your company already produces is rarely the constraint. Getting it into a form a management team can act on within the month is.
How we do it
Understand the requirement
What decision is this dashboard supposed to support, and who is going to look at it on a Monday morning?
Extract the data
Pull from the ERP or source systems in .xls and .csv, and reconcile it to what finance already reports.
Define the KPIs
Agree the metric definitions before building anything. Most dashboard disputes are definition disputes.
Build the live dashboard
Category, product, geography and variance views that refresh rather than being rebuilt each month.
Analyse and present
Walk management through the result, and hand over the file so the analysis continues without us.
Analytics against intelligence
Business analytics uses statistical analysis and predictive modelling to establish trends, work out why things are happening, and make educated calls about how they will play out. Business intelligence is more concerned with the whats and the hows — querying, data mining, OLAP, reporting and performance monitoring.
If you are working with masses of raw data and want extensive control over how it is used, what you need falls under BI. If the question is causal, it falls under BA. Most engagements need some of both.