What does your business need: Business Intelligence or Analytics?

Every day within any business, data is generated, generated and moved around. Every transaction. Every interaction with a customer. One or another transaction process populates one of the ERP, CRM, HRIS, SCM, POS databases or systems. Emails, website analytics, chatbots, NPS surveys, and even sensors in your warehouse or shop create considerable amounts of data.

There's more and more of that data every day. And somewhere inside it, the answers are ‘buried’. How is your business performing? What does the customer think? Where are the bottlenecks in the processes? What brings money, and what only takes time and resources? And most importantly, ‘What if?’

Data by itself is just digital noise. To make it work for the business, it needs to be analysed, interpreted and put to work. Emat EOOD it company helps businesses to put data in order and turn figures into working solutions. We customise analytics to suit the task - from BI dashboards to predictive models and hypotheses. We offer not just to use one of the BI and BA analysis approaches, but by considering them separately, we want to show how they complement each other and together help to make more accurate decisions.

In simple terms, BI helps to understand ‘what was’ and ‘what is’, while BA helps to explain ‘why it happened’, ‘what will happen next’ and ‘what can be changed’.

Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is the collection, analysis and visual presentation of collected data. BI is not just reports, charts and dashboards. It's descriptive analytics: ‘what and how things happened’ and insights for new business operations and strategies. And the first step to replacing intuitive solutions with data-driven business management.

BI - especially useful in departments where working with numbers and quick reactions is important:

• in sales - to track revenue, trends, funnel and repeat purchases
• in marketing - to analyse traffic, website behaviour, conversions and campaign effectiveness.
• in accounting - to control costs, profits
• in HR - to assess turnover, employment, engagement
• in customer service - to monitor requests, complaints and satisfaction
• in operations - to analyse internal processes, stock balances, logistics and order fulfilment.

What does BI do in practice? It helps you understand how sales are going, what's happening with stock, how behaviour on site is changing. BI visualises key metrics, combines data from different systems (CRM, ERP, website) and automates reporting, removes routine.

What then is Business Analytics?
If Business Intelligence tells us what happened, Business Analytics (BA) answers the question: why it happened and what to do about it next.

BA is the next step, Emat development noted. It's not just reports, it's cause-and-effect analysis, forecasts and process optimisation. Imagine that BI shows: in April, sales were down. And BA says: "Look, they dropped because the competitor's price changed and the advertising budget went to a less effective channel. To remedy the situation, we need to do this and this."

BA includes:
- diagnostic analytics - finding the causes of problems
- predictive analytics - modelling future scenarios (e.g. demand)
- prescriptive analytics - recommending how to act in a particular situation
- Hypothesis modelling and testing - before launching a new strategy

BA is usually more deeply integrated into strategic tasks. This is the story for product managers, strategists, marketing, financial analysts, logistics and senior management.

What to choose: BI or BA?
It all depends on your business objectives and goals. For example, if you have a niche online shop and you need to analyse sales, inventory and customer flows, a BI dashboard will work best. However, if you want to improve your marketing strategy, understand why certain products sell better, analyse the buying habits of your ideal customer and more, then BA is your choice.

When BI is the right thing to do:

• If sales is manually uploading data from CRM to Excel, marketing is pulling campaign reports from different platforms, and the finance department is manually updating reports. BI can help you link all data sources, bring order, remove routine and set up automated reports.
• If you need to automatically collect and monitor different revenue and expense metrics
• BI brings together data from different systems - schedules, tasks, reports, payments - into a convenient portal for sharing

When you can't do without BA:

• If you have a SaaS product and need to understand why customers are leaving - cohort analysis (to compare different groups by date of registration and behaviour) and logistic regression (to identify factors that are most often associated with churn) will be helpful
• If logistics failures have begun - BA tools analyse supply chains, route efficiency, cargo weights and supplier performance. Regression analysis helps to understand how a combination of factors (distance, traffic, carrier type) affects the likelihood and size of delays
• If you need to decide what to refine in the product (e.g. for product teams, to analyse frequency and depth of feature usage, use cluster analysis to group users by behaviour and needs, and extract NPS and sentiment data to link feedback to usage patterns

BI and BA together - maximising the value of data
The ideal approach is to use BI and BA in tandem. BI provides operational insights, while BA provides strategic insights. For example, using BI, you can monitor daily operations in real time, while using BA you can forecast possible risks, manage prices, and reduce costs.

In practice, companies first implement BI (to see the numbers) and then move to BA (using these numbers). Emat ltd creates predictive models and tools for hypothesis testing.