Outsourcing business intelligence helps you manage, analyse, and understand your data so you can make better decisions, all at a lower cost. Instead of tying up a lot of company resources on hiring a full-on BI team, you get a ready-made external BI team that has the tools, skills, and experience to turn your raw data into beneficial insights.
Being the #1 BI Consultancy in the world according to G2, we have developed 1,000+ business intelligence solutions for 600+ clients, including Google, Heineken, and Teleperformance. It is safe to say we know the secrets to outsourcing business intelligence successfully.
In this article, we’ll walk you through what to expect when working with a business intelligence outsourcing services provider. We will also advise on how to choose a business intelligence outsourcing partner for your business.
Business intelligence outsourcing involves delegating your data management and analytics tasks to an external team of BI experts. BI analytics outsourcing companies handle everything your business needs to go from data to insights and results, including but not limited to data strategy, data integration, dashboard creation, and advanced reporting.
When all of that is taken care of for you by professionals, you get ready-to-use data-driven insights that you and your internal team can act on quickly. For your business, that means saved time, less cost, and access to expertise that is difficult to get in-house.
BI outsourcing services include many data-related solutions such as data integration, analysis, visualization, and reporting automation. Since BI analytics outsourcing is such a wide field, the provided services would be different depending on the company. For example, the outsourcing business intelligence consulting services that we provide are:
Data integration involves automatically extracting data from multiple data sources into a data warehouse. Outsourced business intelligence analysts would write the code for extracting the data from APIs and scheduling data refresh. After the extraction, the data is usually automatically cleaned using SQL formulas and inserted into data warehouse tables.
Here is a demonstration of how this process works step by step
At Vidi Corp, we have pre-built data connectors that extract data automatically from 10+ sources into a data warehouse. This data warehouse can then be automatically connected to Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or any other BI tool of your choice.
Data analytics involves writing formulas to calculate your KPIs and extract valuable insights from data. BI analytics outsourcing partners use ad-hoc analytics tools like Power BI and Tableau to calculate the KPIs that measure the health of your business.
BI analytics outsourcing mostly covers descriptive analytics, which explains what has happened in the business and helps to monitor performance. However, BI outsourcing also involves predictive analytics and trend forecasting.
Data visualization involves creating easy-to-understand charts and dashboards that communicate insights clearly through data. Several charts are usually grouped together in a single dashboard, like you see above, where they give more context to each other.
Our business intelligence outsourcing team has built 1,000 dashboards for 600+ clients. You can see some of our business intelligence case studies if you are curious about our work.
BI strategy services involve consulting on choosing business intelligence architecture and how to use dashboards to drive decisions. A good BI strategy covers everything from the tools you use to how you govern your data, to selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) that actually matter.
Your business intelligence outsourcing partner would take your team through hands-on training to teach them how to read insights, track performance, and make decisions based on their dashboards so they can start using them to drive improvement every day.
It is usually cheaper to outsource business intelligence than hire or train in-house employees in business intelligence. Most BI projects require a few weeks of heavy development and then a few hours of maintenance per year. As a result, paying per project is usually much cheaper than hiring full-time.
Many BI analytics dashboards also provide valuable insights that lead to cost-savings. For example, our Power BI developers delivered a dashboard that the CFO to identify a one-off cost saving opportunity worth 50,000 EUR. You can read about this case study here.
Firstly BI professionals can usually deliver a dashboard faster than in-house employees. What takes an untrained professional 10 hours to deliver can usually be done in 1-2 hours by a trained outsourced business intelligence analyst.
Secondly, BI dashboards save time by automating manual processes such as data extraction, transformation and refresh. For example, we created a dashboard for DS Smith that saves them 30 hours per month by automatically extracting the data from 30+ data sources. You can read more about this case study in their review.
It is often difficult to predict which skills you will need to complete your BI project successfully. Fortunately, business intelligence outsourcing service providers have a wide range of skills to complete your projects successfully.
When outsourcing business intelligence consulting you immediately gain access to trained BI consultants without the cost of hiring an in-house team. This ultimately helps to progress your projects quicker and eliminate a lot of revisions later on.
When you outsource business Intelligence analysts, your internal team gets to focus on growth, product improvement, customer engagement, and other core business activities instead of data cleaning and report creation.
Outsourcing business intelligence services means you pay for services, not salaries, so you can scale your analytics up (add more dashboards, data sources, etc) or down as your business grows or slows without having to hire or train more staff.
A good BI outsourcing partner can provide data governance support to ensure that your data is always secure and trustworthy. Data governance usually involves setting up a single source of truth, data access policies, monitoring usage, and training the users.
The main benefit of data governance is minimizing legal risks and data leaks. Strong data governance is also essential for accreditation of your company with data security standards like ISO 9001, HIPPA, GDPR, etc.
Firstly, your outsourcing BI partner will take a close look at your current data systems and tools to get a sense of your data maturity. They’ll identify what technology is missing and whether your data is sufficient to fully analyze your business processes. Then, together, you can set some clear targets, define what success looks like for and make a BI implementation plan.
This step usually takes 1-5 working days, depending on the scale and complexity of your project.
Now the real work starts. At this point, your outsourced business intelligence partner codes integrations with your data sources, calculates your KPIs and builds your dashboards.
This step usually takes between 1-4 weeks per dashboard, depending on the scale and complexity of your requirements.
Once your dashboards are developed, you would usually have a call with your BI analytics outsourcing partner. You would review and interpret the analysis together so that you can use the data to drive your business decisions.
After everything is up and running, your partner monitors how things are performing against the set KPIs. They’ll be regularly reviewing results and tweaking the strategy as needed to make sure the dashboard is still paying off for your business.
Before you settle on working with any BI outsourcing partner, verify the following things:
Data modelling, manipulation, engineering, visualisation, and how to work with BI tools (Power BI, Tableau, or your preferred tool) are skills they must have. See if they can answer your technical questions and dig into their past projects and reviews to be sure they have the needed expertise to meet your needs.
At Vidi Corp, for example, our team’s expertise in all the above-listed can be seen in the hundreds of reviews our clients have left us on trusted platforms like Clutch and G2.
Make sure the partner has built BI solutions for businesses like yours to ascertain that they understand your industry’s data patterns, KPIs, and challenges and can develop dashboards and reports that fit your specific needs, not a one-size-fits-all.
Vidi Corp BI Consultancy has delivered over 1,000 BI projects across industries such as manufacturing, finance, and education. See our BI case studies.
Get them to walk you through their BI process. Ideally, they should have a clear roadmap of how they plan, build, and deliver solutions, including timelines, check-in points, and testing stages. It’s a good signal that the project will be successful and also helps keep everyone accountable.
Vidi Corp was named the #1 Business Intelligence consultancy in the world by G2, a recognition built on years of helping businesses turn raw data into powerful insights. Our team specialises in providing BI solutions that combine strategy, analytics, and automation to help companies make better, faster decisions.
We’ve worked with industry leaders like Google, the UK Ministry of Defence, and many growing organisations across education, healthcare, finance, and retail. They trust us because we don’t just build dashboards… we help them achieve real business outcomes.
No, seriously. In one project, a client reported that our BI solution cut data consolidation tasks by 95% and reduced reporting time from 48 hours to under five minutes. Read the full client review.
Ready to hire an outsourced business intelligence analyst? Reach out to Vidi Corp.
You hire external experts to manage, analyse, and visualise your data so you can make faster, better decisions without building an in-house BI team.
Outsourcing saves time and cost, and gives you access to BI talent and tools that may be too expensive or hard to maintain in-house.
Look for technical expertise, industry experience, a straightforward implementation process, and strong data security.
