For a company to be able to collect data and transform it into knowledge, we rely on a special management tool: Business Intelligence, also known as Business Intelligence or Business Intelligence.

As it is a very useful and highly important tool in the financial area, we have prepared a very complete article about BI and its dashboard KPIs. Continue following our article!

What is Business Intelligence?

Nowadays, all organizations need historical data to aid in decision-making. After all, one way to predict the future is by analyzing the past through a new perspective. Competitiveness leaves no room for error, and therefore, qualified professionals increasingly seek to analyze data to present it to directors. Thus, more accurate actions are put into practice.

BI is an acronym that stands for Business Intelligence. Many call it business intelligence because it encompasses all areas of the company, from finance, operations, and sales to marketing. Literally translated, we have Business Intelligence, and that is exactly what this tool represents: an intelligent way to collect, organize, analyze, share, and monitor information that will subsequently support management.

What is Strategic Management?

Strategic Management is a set of practices and objectives defined by the company's top managers, taking into account the company's internal and external environments. In addition to determining an organization's main objectives and the time each action will take, executives are also responsible for defining how these objectives will be achieved and allocating resources for the goals to materialize.

What many don't know is this: small businesses can benefit from strategic management best practices to boost their growth, and they can do so without large budgets for strategic planning.

Benefits of BI

To make this possible, BI enables the creation of panels and dashboards according to each user's needs. In other words, when accessing Business Intelligence, the user creates the necessary indicator panels to perform the analysis they need. All of this is done agilely, as the Business Intelligence tool extracts information contained in your database.

Here are some of the benefits of Business Intelligence tools, including: Check them out:

• Speed and improvement in the decision-making process
• Optimization of internal business processes
• Increased operational efficiency
• New recipe generation
• Gain of competitive advantage
• Market trend identification.

Benefits of Strategic Management

In addition to seeking to enable objectives, obtain a return rate above the market average, and meet the expectations of other stakeholders, strategic management can contribute, for example, to achieving the following benefits:

• Both the executive team and employees gain a shared vision of the entire business.
• The organization's resources and efforts are directed towards the prioritized objectives.
• Emerging market opportunities are perceived and exploited with greater speed.
• Changes in society, the market, and their impact on the company's competitive position are quickly identified and monitored.
• Systematic critical analysis of the competitive strategy and its consistency, based on the results obtained and changes in the competitive environment.

Differences between BI and GE

First and foremost, Business Intelligence (BI) within an organizational setting must have its conceptual foundation established by the Strategy or Strategic Business Planning, anchored in the direction of the objectives to be achieved. BI within an organization provides managers with scenarios containing metrics that can signal how the company is being run and how its strategy is being fulfilled.

Now, let's analyze how the company's Management deals with this concept and technology, and how managers should view BI: for BI to be successful and contribute effectively to Management, once it is balanced and consolidated within the company, integrated with Strategic Planning, which guides the company to take the right direction. Using the methodology PDCA It can also be very useful, as well as adding value to business intelligence.

But then, is a BI system the same as budget management software?

Without beating around the bush, the answer is no! If we analyze management software, we'll see that it has functionalities that allow the user to collect and analyze data, generate management reports, and analyze performance graphs and indicators – to name a few functions. This is basically what we mentioned that a Business Intelligence solution does, right?

Despite this similarity, there is a difference between BI and Management solutions. With everything we've said so far, you should have noticed that Business Intelligence aims to support data-driven decision-making. A Strategic Management solution also allows for this, but BI tools are more efficient, enabling the visualization of data from various parts of the business on a single dashboard.

This allows the manager to get a macro analysis of which products sell the most, in which stores, as well as a micro analysis, being able to identify which employee sold the most, for example. A Strategic Management Solution, on the other hand, allows for an analysis more focused on finances, meaning how each specific area affects the company's budget.

Conclusion

If we are to summarize what we discussed in this article, we could say that, especially for managers, working with a Business Intelligence tool is having a ‘Smart Business.’ Excel spreadsheets might offer initial help, but besides not keeping data centralized, they do not automate the functions of a Business Intelligence tool, let alone Strategic Management.

An efficient tool allows you to collect, organize, analyze, share, and monitor all information in one place, and without excessive work.

Now that you understand the differences between BI and Strategic Management, how about learning more about the functions of each? We've put together a complete article on the BI: what it is and what it's for and as 6 Strategic Management Software Features That Help Increase Productivity. We hope this article has been helpful and adds value to your company's management!