10 Business Problems BI Automation Cracks

What opportunities become available to you with business intelligence automation in place? Extracting value from diverse data sources leads to increased customer satisfaction, better staff engagement and productivity, minimized number of human errors, and more. However, utilizing the full potential of BI is possible only when it’s married with a robust automation strategy. 

The rapidly growing demand for automation among the leading analytics platforms proves the point. For instance, a famous analytics vendor, Tibco, was about to merge with Blue prism, a pioneer among RPA vendors at the end of 2021, while Alteryx partnered with UiPath, a company that also delivers an RPA-based platform. Automation is now viewed as not only a facilitator of the repeated processes but also as an essential part of insight delivery. So whether you’re at the beginning of your journey to a data-driven organization or you’ve been leveraging BI for a while, here’s a list of problems that BI automation can help you solve.

1. An inefficient process of discovering and ranking insights

Extracting and ranking data-driven insights manually is quite an exhausting process. Besides, it steals precious working hours that your team could dedicate to more important tasks.

The implementation of BI dashboards is a wise step for organizations overwhelmed with data. It can help them avoid wasting time and human effort and streamline workflows overall. Apart from uncovering actionable insights in real time, automated tools enable users to prioritize them, thus contributing to smarter decision-making. 

Speaking of the opportunities BI automation entails, healthcare is a vivid example of an industry that craves them most. Producing tremendous amounts of data, medical organizations often face the challenges of handling loads of heterogeneous data with a limited number of employees. They might find themselves confused on how to implement high-end software in a clinical setting.

Thus, medical organizations can become more proactive in exploring trends and demographics by using the clustering feature in Tableau. The solution helps to define statistically similar groups based on the indicated attributes, for example, rank insights on pediatrics and compare short-stay patients to the extended-stay ones.

2. Poor data quality

When processing large volumes of data, it’s too hard to overcome the human factor and detect every single error on the spot. Sacrificing data quality can cost you a lot as this leads to large financial losses, a damaged company reputation, inaccurate targeting, uninformed decisions, among others.

Specifically, poor data can affect sales and marketing pipelines. If your mailing lists lack “hygiene”, have wrong contact information, or include addressees who have already unsubscribed, you are likely to have extremely high churn rates and lose potential clients.

In this regard, data preprocessing becomes a big deal in a struggle for accurate and reliable analytics. However, data scientists often fail to perform thorough preprocessing due to the acute lack of time. The use of platforms, such as Microsoft Power BI, can eliminate the need for repetitive manual data cleansing. With the help of Power Query Editor, you can automatically identify and remove duplicates, missing values, or errors, thus waving goodbye to another obstacle to the overall company’s productivity.

3. Analyzing data from disparate systems

Some companies can’t keep pace with digital transformation and fall behind in migrating from legacy systems to more modern ones. A recent survey by CIO Insider revealed that an average IT department across all industries spends about 55% of its technology budget on maintaining existing infrastructures instead of building new innovative capabilities. In this way, legacy systems become a heavy burden as their expensive maintenance and lack of integration with modern ecosystems hold back a lot of organizations.

Business Intelligence automation, in its turn, effectively streamlines data flow from one system to another and helps to collect data into a single source of truth. Additionally, automated solutions simplify structuring content to get it ready for analysis.

4. Limited access to information due to dependence on technical staff 

Though having unimpeded access to data for all teams within an organization seems a sure thing, it doesn’t really work this way in practice. In most cases, legacy systems simply lack flexibility and require the participation of data scientists to derive data-driven insights and distribute them to all levels of the company.

Applying a BI toolset greatly contributes to the democratization of information. The use of cloud databases like Azure or Google Cloud empowers users without deep technical knowledge to access any information in the company’s warehouse and convert data into a convenient format for quick sharing of the important content through corporate channels independently from an IT department.

5. Poor customer experience

Most businesses aim at providing a better customer experience, but very few really succeed. The reason is random guesswork, as confused managers often base their conclusions on insufficient or unreliable data. All this leads to the promotion of the wrong goods, services, or features, resulting in unsatisfied customers.

Why is BI automation a win-win scenario in this case? It hardly needs saying that communication is the key. Customers themselves know what they want. In this regard, collecting feedback with interactive in-app or online surveys and tracking customer behavior on websites are forward-leaning steps on the way to understanding customer needs, being more responsive to market changes, and increasing revenue.

6. Manual data entry

Given that manual data entry is a time-consuming routine process prone to errors and typos, it’s not a practical option for most companies. Whether you need to capture personal information from a CV for HR purposes or extract important data from invoices for an accounting report, automated OCR-based software can successfully optimize these tasks.

Such solutions help to automatically pull out data from varied resources, including PDFs, photos, or websites, and deliver it in a structured visible format in several clicks.

7. Manual querying

Instead of wasting employees’ time on searching and summarizing information, automated solutions gather data from multiple sources, generate reports and present them on schedule, without the need for human effort.

Giants like Netflix and TLC have embarked on their automation journey and their achievements inspire others to do the same. Specifically, TLC claimed its productivity increased by 25%, while Netflix manages to save 50 employee hours daily by leveraging automated reporting solutions.

Recently, our team also helped a media-services provider to optimize the decision-making flows by deploying self-service BI. The implemented solution freed up business users from cumbersome report generation, saving approximately 280 hours per month and increasing customer satisfaction by 85%.

8. Having no idea of what your competitors are up to

Today’s highly competitive business landscape makes companies struggle for their position more than ever before. As they say, forewarned is forearmed, and BI automation should become your major weapon in tracking performance.

While Ahrefs and Semrush can help you find your competitors’ keywords, Google Alerts will timely notify you when your rivals are mentioned online. Detecting and analyzing the key performance metrics with smart BI automation tools will keep you updated about the market situation in real-time and reveal if you are at risk of being out of the running. 

9. Low employee productivity and engagement

Nowadays, employee burnout is spreading almost as fast as the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings from recent research by Deloitte indicated that 77% of employees face the problem of burnout at their current workplace. Apart from working extra hours and lack of vacation time, respondents also mention unclear job expectations and lack of workplace communication as the reasons.

Keeping the staff motivated can be solved by Business Intelligence automation in several directions:

• As BI dashboards visualize important metrics and provide important statistics, they can be used as tools for keeping employees informed about the company’s mission, vision, and priorities. A transparent information flow creates a sense of engagement and belonging to common goals.
  
• In terms of personal performance, BI dashboards are useful assistants as well, enabling employees to easily access all the needed metrics and identify areas for improvement with a click of a button. Such analysis empowers the teams to have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, better identify priorities and improve in-house communication, thus avoiding overloads and minimizing the risk of burnouts.

10. An overworked and overwhelmed HR department

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the way businesses get the workflows going, and HR departments were among the first to adapt to the new circumstances. 98% of HR leaders highlight that they have experienced significant transformations in their roles and responsibilities throughout the pandemic.

With automated BI, recruiters can gather data about past, current, and potential employees in one place to successfully assess employee strengths and weaknesses, track performance, offer relevant professional courses, motivate the staff, prevent conflicts and burnouts, and a lot more.

Automation unleashes the never-before-seen power of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is a valuable asset and critical ingredient of every operational field, regardless of the organization’s size and domain. It ensures that you won’t miss out on any meaningful data insights and put decision-making on a higher level. However, only automation makes the mission of BI a reality. At *instinctools, we’ve helped hundreds of business users to apply intelligent automation and make their BI adventures intuitive and secure, ensuring productivity and prudent use of resources.