So far, we’ve talked a lot about decisions and data, and you may be wondering where these two things meet.
The answer is Business Intelligence (BI).
BI is the process of collecting and analysing data to help businesses make better decisions.
When used well, BI helps companies work more efficiently, cut down on waste, and find new ways to grow. It gives you a clearer picture of what’s happening in your business, so your decisions are not just fast, but right.
We are a BI consultancy that has successfully helped over 500 clients seamlessly go from data to decisions through business intelligence. This article will explain exactly what BI is, what are the benefits of business intelligence, how it can help your business grow, and some pitfalls to avoid.
All these benefits are backed up by real case studies and reported by our clients in their reviews. We will provide the links to those review to support our points.
Business Intelligence covers all the data analytics and visualisation tools, technologies, and practices you can use to transform your data into insights that lead to better decisions and ultimately better business outcomes.
What started as simple, static reports has now evolved into a hard-hitting system that gives you real-time AI-powered insights. Instead of just looking at what happened in the past, today’s Business Intelligence tools help you understand why it happened and what might happen next. This shift has made BI more interactive, faster, and a lot more useful for decision-making across all levels of a business.
As a business leader, you make thousands of decisions every day—some big, some small, all important. If you want to be sure about the decisions that you are making, they should be supported by data.
Business Intelligence helps take the guesswork out of the equation. Instead of relying on gut instinct alone, you get clear, reliable insights drawn straight from your data. That means faster decisions, better timing, and more confidence in every move you make.
Take our client Neterra Telecommunications for example. After their business intelligence implementation they reported that they:
You can read more about this case study on their clutch review.
Much business time is wasted on routine tasks such as copy-pasting data, manual data transformation, and data entry. Research shows that employees spend nearly 40% of their time gathering and preparing data. That’s time that could be spent on more strategic and high-value tasks.
This is where Business Intelligence comes in to help. With BI, you can automate reports and cut hours of manual work down to a few clicks. You can spot workflow bottlenecks to fix what’s slowing things down. And when it comes to managing resources—people, time, or money—BI helps you allocate them where they’ll make the most impact. Less effort, more progress.
For example when we implemented business intelligence reports for the marketing team of DS Smith, they reported time savings of 30+ working hours per month.
Every business has areas where resources are being wasted – whether it’s overspending, excess inventory, or operational inefficiencies. Business Intelligence helps you find these leaks fast.
With BI, you can track spending in real time to spot wasteful habits or unnecessary costs before they add up. It gives you the tools to optimise inventory and supply chains so you don’t overstock or run out. BI helps you keep costs under control and get the most out of what you have.
There are many reasons why your business may adopt Business Intelligence, but one of the biggest is to get ahead. If you can consistently make better decisions than your competitors, you will eventually start to break away.
BI helps you turn data into action, quite literally. BI is a proven way to outsmart and out-deliver your competition, stay one step ahead, and address your customers’ changing needs.
For example, when we implemented BI for an HVAC company, they reported a 40% faster turnaround time for strategic decisions and cutting executive review cycles by 2 days.
Risk is part of business, but the best way to manage it is to anticipate it, monitor it, and act before it becomes a bigger problem. Business Intelligence makes risk management much easier by giving you the tools to identify and respond to risks quickly. Whether financial, operational or market-related, BI helps you spot risks early.
For example, in 2021 we were engaged as a BI consultancy by Google after they were fined 100M EUR in the EU for missing a new legislation that came into effect. They then invested into gathering new regulations data from every country where they operated and classified the impact of all the new regulations on every product. We then created a Looker Studio dashboard to highlight the specific regulations that the company needs to pay attention to. This ultimately led to a data-driven approach to risk management and reduced the risk of further fines.
A data-driven culture is where decisions are made on facts and insights, not guesswork or assumptions. Companies that adopt this culture do better – research from Forbes says data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to outperform their competitors in customer acquisition, 19 times more likely to be profitable, and 6.7 times more likely to retain customers.
Business Intelligence makes it easier to create this culture by making data accessible to all teams. BI allows everyone in your organisation – from marketing to operations – to see the same data and insights. Shared dashboards make it easy to see key metrics and KPIs in real time, so everyone works towards the same goals. Your team can make better, more coordinated decisions that drive success across the board.
For example a medical software company reported that once BI was implemented, the team raved how they could transform their performance based on visibility updates in real time.
Power BI Real-time Dashboard by Vidi Corp
One of the other key benefits of business intelligence is not having to manually refresh the data in your reports. You simply create your reports once and schedule the automatic data refresh to happen several times a day.
Tools like Power BI make this super easy. They pull live data from your various data systems and display it in real-time dashboards. You don’t have to be a tech expert to see your data-driven insights and KPIs—just open the Power BI dashboard and voila, the numbers are there.
This is highlighted in a review from an agriculture manufacturing firm that real-time data pulled from QuickBooks Online into a Power BI report helped them eliminate manual data entry errors and led to improved reporting accuracy.
As your business grows, so does your data—and that gets overwhelming fast. The good part is that BI tools grow with you. Whether you’re adding new products, opening new locations, or just dealing with more customers, your BI system can handle it. Most modern BI platforms are cloud-based, so scaling up is easy. You can plug in more data sources, add more users, or expand your dashboards without rebuilding everything from scratch. And if you’re operating across different regions or time zones, centralised analytics keeps everyone on the same page. You get one view of your business no matter where your teams are.
For example, we once worked with a company that actively acquired new businesses multiple times a year. Those new businesses had their data in separate QuickBooks Online accounts which needed to be included in the management reports.
We built a fully automated system that made it possible to add QuickBooks accounts into the Power BI report with a click of a button. This report combined 100+ QuickBooks Online accounts into a single file.
As seen in the last section, benefits of business intelligence are huge, but it’s not the easiest thing to implement. Many businesses hit the same roadblocks when integrating BI into their workflow. Knowing what to expect and how to navigate this can make all the difference between a painful experience and a transformational one.
Some implementation pitfalls to look out for are:
We have analysed the major benefits of business intelligence and give reasons to adopt BI in your business to stay competitive, efficient, and future-proof. The benefits are proven and cannot be overlooked – better decision-making, cost savings, and faster growth. With the right tools, strategy, and support, any business can crack the full potential of its data.
Are you ready to reap the benefits of business intelligence in your organisation? Vidi Corp is here to help you do just that.
