I have recently been exposed to a completely new aspect of business operations and management. This underused tool combines accounting, finance, technology, and operations. It makes smart companies smarter, and executives across the country and around the world stand up and take notice. You should consider it for your business because being smart means moving fast. And for entrepreneurs and companies that want to compete as if they were entrepreneurs, accurately extracted information means great entrepreneurial power. What is this new magic formula? In a sentence, “Business Intelligence”.

It seems so obvious that a company would want as much business intelligence as it can. But I’ve been inside hundreds, if not thousands, of companies, and most companies are not organized intelligently. The proverbial right hand rarely knows what the left is doing. When Operations does not contact Accounting, invoices are not sent on time. When Sales & Marketing is not working synchronously with the inventory management system, there are problems on the horizon.

According to Wikipedia, Business Intelligence (BI) refers to computer techniques that are used to detect, extract and analyze business data, such as sales revenue by products and / or departments or associated costs and revenues.

This is a very doable definition, but it is a mouthful. To be more concise, Business Intelligence means having the right information for your business when you need it.

It’s not sexy, but it’s critically important to businesses of all shapes and sizes. A recent IBM commercial asks if someone would blindly cross the street knowing there were no cars on the road 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 days ago. Of course not, but isn’t that how most companies make most of their decisions?

An engineer from Los Angeles has made Business Intelligence his life’s work. Tooraj Kazeminy has done dozens of implementations for a significant number of companies, many of which he has heard of, to help them manage their data and turn it into useful information. Find him and talk to him. It will be worth the call. It has shown me how valuable this technology can be. It is not just a good idea. It is mandatory to stay ahead of the competition.

What if you could have access to technologies that provide historical, current, and predictive views of your business operations? There are software platforms that provide many of the common functions of business intelligence technologies, such as reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Because the platforms already exist, your business won’t have to pay to reinvent the wheel. Request an assessment of your current business structures and data management issues, and you could be on your way to better reporting, better information, less noise, and more focus on your industry or company KPIs. It is not very expensive to implement these platforms and the return on investment is fast and spectacular. The value is outstanding.

You may wonder if your software already does this. I could do some of that. But if you have an operations software to manage your plant or a Salesforce type software to handle the flow of leads and some accounting package to control the finances of the company, you will end up with several systems, all with different reports. The problem with this is that different perspectives may not translate into accurate and reliable reports.

Business Intelligence platforms take each of the data warehouses that your company uses and take the specific information that each executive, or each department, needs to support better business decision making. This is the reason why business intelligence systems are often called decision support systems.

Don’t confuse business intelligence with competitive intelligence. Both support decision making. Business intelligence mainly uses internal data, while competitive intelligence works mainly with external data, although some internal information will be sought to support decision making.

Use this as a starting point. Call resources for more information. Contact Tooraj Kazeminy to see if these concepts can help your business. As a fellow entrepreneur, I encourage you to use this information to stay ahead of the curve.