In today’s digital age, many entrepreneurs of small and medium business enterprises along with corporate entities are relaying on their historical data to evaluate their performance in a competitive environment and to identify operating inefficiencies. In their endeavor to enhance their competitiveness in the business environment in which they operate and to surge ahead of their competitors, these entrepreneurs and corporate leaders are implementing business intelligence strategies and tools. Business intelligence tools and strategies assist such entrepreneurs and business leaders in examine their historical data that they derive from their business enterprise to search for patterns, correlation between action and efforts and measurable business performance results.

According to Charles Phillips – a prominent business intelligence specialist and CEO of Infor, business intelligence implies a system of analytics-intensives procedures and techniques that accumulate and analyze relevant business data to identify meaningful correlations and patterns. The entrepreneurs and the top management of corporate enterprises employ these patterns, trends and correlations to formulate and implement effective business strategies to restructure the business or corporate enterprise or to anticipate future occurrences in their business environment. The esteemed Charles Phillips Oracle team emphasizes five ways in which entrepreneurs and corporate leaders can stimulate grow in their businesses with business intelligence solution.

1. Benchmark the business: In order to move forward and strives towards achieving their business and corporate objective, it is imperative for all entrepreneurs and top management enterprise need to know where they are at present. The business intelligence software accumulates relevant business data from a number of sources like invoices, packing slips, online sales, bank statements and other documents and identifies trends in such reports. This makes it easier for such entrepreneurs and corporate leaders to identify areas in their business operations where they need to improve productivity and efficiency.

2. Measuring ROI of new products, suppliers and customers: The most important advantage of implementing business intelligence software solutions to help entrepreneurs and corporate leaders compare the returns on investment of alternative business decisions. For instance, it is possible for such entrepreneurs and leaders to run a query in their business intelligence software regarding the expenditure and ROI of teaming up with a particular supplier.

3. Risk assessment and identifying areas of improvement: Business intelligence software solutions give entrepreneurs and corporate leaders the ability to identify and alleviate unnecessary risk and inefficiencies in their business operations. This software can also help such entrepreneurs and business leaders identify the profitability in various business segments in the environment in which they operate and help them to concentrate their efforts in those segments, which show the highest profitability.

4. Forecast the future: The most important application of business intelligence software is to assist entrepreneurs and corporate leaders in forecasting future phenomena in their business environment based on customers’ behavior and demand along with inventory levels.

The Charles Phillips Oracle team states that with the aid of business intelligence software solutions, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders can identify action they need to take to stay ahead of the competition in their respective business environments. They identify potential risks, evaluate the ROI of various investment decisions and forecast future trends before implementing the ideal solution helps their businesses survive and strive in their respective business environments.