If you are working in the Banking, Telecommunications or Retail sector, you surely know about the importance of Business Intelligence. Your company has a large volume of business transactions and therefore succeeding in business becomes a numbers game. Probably your company has implemented a data warehouse to capture data about relevant business metrics and there are a broad range of processes and tools in place to make use of the captured information to facilitate decision making, pricing policies, business governance, etc. Your company knows that a clear understanding of underlying business figures will enable you to extract valuable insight to understand where you are leaving money on the table and how you can boost your revenues further. And, indeed, most people that we work with, who have a background in the above mentioned industries, understand the value of data analysis and the requisite tools (Business Intelligence systems) very well.

However, during the last couple of years, we have seen significant improvements in BI software performance, including the availability of previously high-end analytics at entry-level pricing points. Today, a company can implement Business Intelligence systems from leading brands for less than five million baht and, depending on the specific requirements, perhaps for much less. Therefore, I believe the BI market has come of age to a point where even medium sized companies across more or less any industry segment can contemplate such solutions. I believe that in many cases there is a strong business case to implement a central Business Intelligence solution. There are many aspects of business that, if monitored closely, can be improved significantly over time.

Here are some examples how modern, progressive companies may be able to realize substantial business value from Business Intelligence systems:

Example 1: Your company has many sales branches across the country. Business Intelligence systems can help to capture key performance data from all branches such as sales, costs, performance ratios and display the information centrally for further analysis. You will not only be able to see how each branch, or a group of branches, is progressing, you can also compare peer branches to see which branch is falling behind in which business aspect. This will make your business improvement efforts very focused and effective.

Example 2: Your company is strongly dependent on your brand positioning in the market. To ensure a strong brand position, you run many branding campaigns and, in support of this, must ensure all customer touch points – i.e., wherever a customer comes in contact with the organization – are behaving in a professional manner that consistently re-enforces the brand image. Thus, you define an appropriate score-card of measurement criteria for each type of touch point that can be collected, stored, collated and analyzed in near real-time using BI tools, thereby allowing easy identification of where customers have problems interacting with your brand . Like this, you get valuable information on how to maximize the return on your advertising budget.

Example 3: Your company services customers at many sites throughout the country. You have a Quality Assurance team to monitor delivery quality. Business Intelligence systems can help consolidate customer feedback information for all customers whilst simultaneously cross-indexing the relative importance of each customer to your business. This information will help your Quality Assurance team to focus their time at customers where it really matters, i.e. customers that are highly important to your business but also have a need to improve service quality.

These are only three examples how Business Intelligence systems can help modern, progressive companies on a cross-industry basis. From our experience, there are wide ranging opportunities for companies to leverage the way they handle information. Applying the principle “what you measure you can manage” these systems can help you focus your resources on where it really matters and ensure you don’t miss opportunities to improve your bottom line. Since the investment for such systems has fallen continuously over recent times, many more Thai companies should now consider embracing the benefits that the technology in this area has to offer.