Eugene Lebedev is a Power BI consultant by background. Before founding Vidi Corp in 2021 he created Power BI reporting for Autodesk. His Power Bi reports were used by VPs of Finance and C-suite of Autodesk. As part of Vidi Corp, Eugene created dashboards for Google, Teleperformance, Delta Airlines and 200+ clients worldwide.
Businesses deal with a large amount of data about their customers, prospects, internal business processes, suppliers, partners, and competitors. Collecting data alone is not sufficient in any means, you need to channelize it in proper directions to transform this data into actionable insights that drive the increase in revenue, profitability, and business efficiency. And to make it happen, business owners are turning their eyeballs towards Business Intelligence. When we say BI, there are hundreds of BI analytics tools that offer BI solutions. Still, unfortunately, no one BI tool fits all dimensions of a business and this brings panic in deciding which BI software to buy and which should not. As a BI agency, we often see our clients finding it challenging to choose the right BI tool for their business.
Selection of the (business intelligence) BI tool that best fits an organization for data analysis and reporting usage is critical to any BI project, at the enterprise level or an individual business level. As there are many BI tools to choose from, making a wrong decision in the selection of a BI tool may put your entire business and growth at higher risk. These reasons made us write this blog article for you.
Through this blog today, we are going to brief you on how to pick the right BI tool for your business and will suggest some best practices in selecting it. So, Stay on!
To see how you can optimise your reporting with Bi Tools, enquire now.
A business intelligence (BI) tool is an analytics tool used for data visualization, reporting, and analysis. To be precise, it turns raw enterprise data into visual reports or insights to make wise decisions backed by analysis and proof of data.
A BI tool serves myriad purposes, from the most technical aspects such as ETL process and data-mining to a simple need to aggregate a cross-section of records and quickly pull up informative charts. Dashboards and reports are commonly used for day-to-day analysis and continuous monitoring of progress is an integral part of BI
When you are searching for BI tool, look out for the following benefits of BI reporting tools :
1. Multiple Data source connectivity:
Access to various databases and file types, such as CSV, text, Excel, and XML files, is a basic and one of the must-have features to look into as it eases the collection of data from even various third-party applications like Salesforce, SAP, CRM, etc.
2. Desktop and mobile-friendly UI
It is not practical or worthwhile if a certain application is constrained only to a desktop or mobile version. Typically an Ideal BI tool should have feasibility and user interface to support multiple devices, and most importantly, an intuitive, easy-to-use UI is preferable.
3. Data Visualization and reporting:
It is the most core and basic feature of a BI tool, they must provide bar, line, pie, time-series, and geo-map types for data visualization uses and the ability to mix and match multiple combinations of charts. Again it’s useless if the tool is not equipped with dashboards and design reporting components in a BI tool. Practically it is a required element in BI tools to share dashboards and reports with other users.
4. Data filtering:
An ideal BI tool should enable you to filter the contents of a BI dashboard or report by the range of data values, using features such as drop-down menus, search filters, and slicers. If this is not the case, then a lot of time may be consumed in filtering manually for you and your clients too.
5. Security:
In the modern age of data and its privacy regulations, any organization needs to hold the importance of security on top. BI tools come with security guarding features by providing user access controls and role-based security to define who can create, modify, publish, use and administer BI applications.
To help narrow down your focus, let’s think about it from a business perspective.
BI tools typically offer their pricing portfolio based on the number of users. If you have a large team with several business units within your organization, such as sales, marketing, finance, and if all of these units are part of an analytically driven ecosystem, then you may need a BI tool based on compactness of size. Else you own a business where analytics is a component of only the management team such as founders, Ceo, CTO, Cfo, stakeholders, etc., who takes key decisions, then you may need a management-focused BI tool.
Nowadays, almost all BI tools are functional in the form of a hybrid model that comes with operational support through your local servers or with cloud servers. Based on your server network requirement and resources, you can deploy your BI software application on your local servers, self-hosted cloud servers, or on user-based cloud servers or can opt for it as a SaaS product. It is another use case from a business perspective.
Some businesses need applications beyond BI, such as AI-driven, ML applications, Natural language processing (NLP), data warehousing, developing ETL, and other applications that may require some additional or customizations features. This is also a defining aspect in choosing the one. Advanced features like in-memory analytics help in pulling data into an in-memory cache to enable very fast analytics performance.
You need to pose a few questions yourself, and once you answer them, you will be in a good position to make your choice.
Why do you want a BI platform?
Various companies, departments, and employees have different needs and requirements, so It’s crucial to be clear on the specific need you’ll be using the BI tool to attack.
What level of service do your end users want?
Every user will not have the same need and same requirements. They might vary from basic to advanced, and moreover, sometimes a single tool may not fit all those needs, so choose a tool based on level of need.
How will it help your team collaborate?
This is another good question you should ask yourself because you surely need your team to function collaboratively, and sharing reports or dashboards should not be painful, but many simple tools likely fall in this category. Only a few premium tools are rich in collaboration features.
selecting a BI tool that supports seamless integration with existing systems will be extraordinarily useful. This lets businesses retrieve and organize data that may be in more than one location and source and lets commercial enterprise users explore data. For example, an ideal BI tool shall support different resources such as spreadsheets, ERP, CRM.
There are three major points to consider in regards to cost: subscriptions, user support, and hidden fees. You should have the full details on all factors of pricing beforehand. Also, look out for whether the vendor requires quarterly or yearly subscriptions on top of any upfront costs? These hidden costs may not be advertised; however may come into play later so, consider this as a factor while choosing your BI tool.
Many business owners assume going only over the visual functionalities of BI tools such as visual presentation and report customization is sufficient. Still, when creating your data visualizations, you also need to check how easy the tool is to use. So, visuals may not seem the only important factor when choosing a BI tool; if your dashboards are difficult to create or to understand, it will be obviously more difficult to get people to use the tool in the best way.
In any organization, reports and dashboards should be available for various departments such as IT, operations, sales, marketing, and individuals such as key decision-makers. So, you should have a BI tool that supports multiple devices such as desktops, mobiles, tablets, and different OS such as windows, IOS, Android, Linux. It is obvious that users may not have the feasibility of accessing the tool only through desktop or laptop all the time; in such conditions, mobility of reports and dashboards makes a great convenience, and operations excel faster.
A growing number of BI vendors are incorporating low code or relatively no-code development tools into their platforms to streamline and ease the process of building BI applications. If you have a team of dedicated developers and are in need of stand-alone dashboards, then you may go for the ones that support high-end coding, or you can simply rely on no code or low code BI tools according to your requirements.
If your requirement of analytics and reports depends on multiple shoulders, you should have an easy and secure way of collaboration. We all know that manipulation or misuse of critical data may lead to hazardous impacts on a company’s growth and reputation, so the BI tool should enable easy to share collaborative functions that support hierarchical and role-based security.
When you are just getting started with a new tool, you may have different functionalities and approaches for the same result, which may lead to confusion, increase work time, and diminish output quality. So, it is highly recommended to study the tool first, let your team get some exposure to it, you can practically train your team for free if the BI tool offers great customer support to answer queries whenever needed round the clock and moreover during outages customer support team should be available. In fact, many BI tools offer monthly webinars, and free demo sessions that help you and your team understand the industry best practices.
No BI tool is the same as others, though their utility and end goal is to provide BI solutions. They do differ in pricing, approach, and based on use cases.
Tableau is most appropriate for businesses that need sophisticated data visualization. You can customize your charts in Tableau in many ways that are not possible with other BI tools. At the same time, Tableau is more expensive and there is no free plan. Because of that Tableau is usually used by medium to large companies. The tool is mostly used for sharing reports with internal stakeholders rather than external because everyone who views the report needs to have a license.
Power BI is most appropriate when you use a lot of Microsoft systems at your company. For example, if you keep your data on Sharepoint, it is easy to connect to Sharepoint with Power BI. Power BI is also used extensively in Financial Analytics as the functionality of the tool is a great fit for such reporting. Power BI is suitable both for small, medium, and large companies since there is a free version and the license only costs $10 per user per month. The tool is mostly used for sharing reports with internal stakeholders rather than external because everyone who views the report needs to have a license.
DOMO distinguishes itself from the competition by offering 2000+ off-the-shelf connectors to various systems. If your business has many systems that you use and you lack internal skills to connect to them, DOMO can be the right choice. However, DOMO is not too transparent with its pricing as it is different for every company. Some have reported that the tool is not cheap so it may be a better fit for large companies.
Google Data Studio is a free and fully web-based tool that makes it great to use for small and medium-sized companies. It also has great integration with all the google systems including Google Ads, Google Analytics, etc. GDS is used heavily in the digital marketing domain since its functionality is very suitable for marketing analytics. It is also easy to share reports to external stakeholders with GDS since no one needs a license to open GDS reports
Without any next thoughts, we can say that BI tools will radically improve your company’s operations, but only if it’s the right tool for your organization. As we already spoke, the product itself and the training, support, and expert team are crucial in a company’s growth. You can easily reap all of the benefits BI has to offer by choosing the right BI tool.
If you want to make sure you’re relying on an expert team of a BI agency who will help innovate solutions tailor-made to your organization’s needs or problems, then Vidi-corp is the perfect choice for you. Our teams that go above and beyond are always committed to making a difference in your entire BI experience and keeping you in the right arch of a data-driven organization.
Book a consultation right now and see how we help you transform from bits to bytes.
If you feel this blog helped you choose the right BI tool for your business, then please feel free to share your thoughts with us.
