Today’s society is an era of information warfare. It is not only important to gather intelligence on competitors to stay ahead and create business opportunities, but internal information within a company is even more crucial. At this moment, BI can help enterprises achieve these goals—knowing yourself and your enemy leads to victory in every battle.
What is BI (Business Intelligence)? Business Intelligence refers to the processes and tools used to analyze business data, transforming it into actionable insights that help everyone within a company make more informed decisions. It is also known as a Decision Support System (DSS). BI analyzes current and historical data and shares reports, dashboards, charts, graphs, and blueprints across the organization in an easy-to-understand format.
The audience for BI is mainly divided into two groups: brand headquarters and individual store owners. This article focuses on the perspective of brand headquarters. By collecting large amounts of data, classifying, and integrating it into a visual interface, headquarters can accurately grasp product sales status, laying the foundation for future strategic decisions. Additionally, the actual operational status of stores becomes transparent, increasing headquarters’ oversight of each store and achieving the goal of effective internal information management.
BI includes many functions, with common modules as follows:
Revenue Data and Product Sales Status
By archiving daily revenue, data on each store’s revenue can be obtained, including detailed summaries of various payment methods. Additionally, actual sales trends can be analyzed based on product categories and time periods.
Store Inventory and Profit & Loss
Daily profit and loss and raw material management of each store are clearly presented to headquarters, enabling decision-makers to quickly grasp and resolve issues.
Real-time Information Display
Real-time sales information allows the company to immediately understand customer reactions to promotions and new products, helping evaluate the success of marketing strategies and providing a basis for future decisions.
Various Customized Reports
Besides basic reports, a wide range of reports and visual interfaces can be customized according to each brand’s needs, creating business intelligence tailored specifically for the brand.
BI is sometimes called “descriptive analytics” because it describes how a business operates currently and how it has operated in the past. It answers questions like “What happened?” and “What should be changed?” but it cannot explore why something happened or what will happen next. For these latter questions, another system is used: AD (Analytics Dashboard, also known as the Battle Command System), which will be discussed in future.