What is business intelligence solutions ?
Business intelligence solutions are a category of software applications used to collect and analyze data to make important business decisions. These software applications allow businesses to understand their customer needs and help them make better decisions. Business intelligence solutions can be categorized as either on-premises or cloud-based business intelligence software. Business intelligence solutions can also be classified by their level of complexity, from simple databases that store raw data to advanced analytical tools.
How to Get Business Intelligence Solutions for your Company
What is Business Intelligence Solutions?
While the term business intelligence may sound complex, it's pretty simple. Business intelligence is a way of thinking and analyzing data to make smarter decisions. It's been around since the 1800s but has only recently been used by restaurants and other organizations to improve their decision-making abilities. A business intelligence solution allows you to evaluate the restaurant's sales performance, periodic sales statistics, and customer habits. It can be any kind of data related to your organization. Restaurants' business resources are spent most efficiently and this helps them to boost revenue. Details provided by Business Intelligence applications help you find the root cause of the problems that occur in your business.
The main goal of a business intelligence solution is to create data-driven companies that can put information into actionable insights to drive profitability and growth. It is done in three ways.
1. Big data- It looks at all the available information about a restaurant or a business.
2. Data mining- It helps to find patterns in data to predict future behaviors.
3. Predictive analytics- It analyzes past behavior to predict future results.
Why you need a Business Intelligence Solution
There are several aspects to running a restaurant. A restaurant owner has to keep track of food and beverage costs, labor costs, meal preparations, recipes, inventory, staffing schedules, table turnovers, and customer interactions. You may also have to keep track of kitchen information.
Every organization generates a big deal of data through multiple systems- employee management, business management, point of sale, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and so on. An effective business intelligence solution helps restaurants and other businesses with data discovery and data gathering. Business intelligence provides facts and information to help solve problems and minimize financial and Strategic Business risks. Using BI solution, any information collected can be used to identify restaurant trends, gain customer insight and reduce costs.
Business intelligence is more into descriptive analytics, which helps create information about the past and present data. But business analytics engages in predictive analytics using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistics to provide forecasts and recommendations. These insights generated by business intelligence solutions help restaurants to stay ahead in their respective areas and make important business decisions.
Get the latest in business intelligence news
Download our free Digital Marketing guide for restaurants.
Choosing the Right Business Intelligence Software
If you are a restaurant owner researching BI tools, the first step is to determine the particular requirements for your business. Business intelligence tools help users to collect and process a sea of information from various data sources for data analysis. This data is then packaged as reports, dashboards, and data visualization.
Before choosing bi software or business intelligence solutions, you need to keep in mind that your needs may evolve in the future. Therefore flexibility should be on your priority list as well as how capable your business' customer service and technical support capabilities are at supporting your current and future needs.
Data Integration should be your another priority while selecting a bi software. The real value of bi software depends on getting data currently housed in multiple systems into the new BI tool.
Make sure you look for business intelligence solutions that enable APIs to gather data in real time. For example, if you have a Business Intelligence solution like Zip POS dashboard, it provides up-to-minute information and access to insightful Data Driven from POS to your system in real time.
Your dashboards should be collaborative and easily accessible from anywhere. This business tool should enable you to generate hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly reports. Zip POS dashboard from Hubworks, provides all levels of data and gives a dimensional view of sales and transactional activity.
Last, but not least, ease of use is also a strong indicator as to how quickly a new solution will adapt to your business. Its interfaces should be easily understood by users and provide a simple method to connect data found both on-premise and in the cloud.
Features of a Good Business Intelligence Solution
A good business intelligence solution has helped businesses to collect, analyze, monitor, and present data in an efficient way to extract insights that will ensure sustainable growth. A BI tool works with data visualization technologies to create business intelligence dashboards, performance scoreboards, and charts that provide business metrics and KPIs. Not all BI solutions
are created equal. Reports and dashboards in your ERP solution can help you see the data. But a good business intelligence solution takes the further leap so that you can analyze, understand, leverage, and visualize the power of information in a better way. Below are the few features to look out for in a business intelligence solution.
Interactive dashboards
An interactive business intelligence dashboard gives a real time overview of all the major factors in your business. This helps business owners to decide on their future moves. Such dashboards make it easy to set and track KPIs for monitoring the progress of any project. Dashboards also cut down response time and facilitate data filtration and prompt actions.
Interactive and ad-hoc reports
A business intelligence solution's major function is to condense massive volumes of data. You may have reports of net sales, sales per labor, and so on to look into. Understanding this data can be cumbersome if it is not condensed. A BI tool like Zip POs Dashboard gives access to insightful data from the POS system in real time.
Connect multiple data sources
Your BI solution should not only combine data from your restaurant's ERP, CRM, and other financial systems but also external sources like third-party applications and other business systems.
Forecast data and trends
For a business to become successful, it should be able to accurately project its sales. Using business intelligence analytics and data analytics, you can collect current and past Sales Reports, from POS systems. It helps owners to reveal trends and predict future sales. Zip Forecasting, available on Hubworks can be integrated with a restaurant management system to predict sales and labor plans.
Business Intelligence Solutions can help in better decision making
The main goal of a business intelligence solution is to translate existing data into information that can be interpreted. This data analysis forms the basis on which businesses make tactical, strategic, and operational decisions within the company. This translation takes shape in the form of a report and analysis.
Making decisions based on data and not human intuition is the key feature of a bi tool. It optimizes all the departments and areas of your business with powerful insights received from the data and ensures that the business succeeds in the long run.
In a restaurant, business intelligence analyzes Business Process and helps you optimize them. It helps you make better decisions about ingredients sourcing, production control, stock management, and distribution of goods and services. Good business intelligence software helps in the easy interpretation of big data and makes data mining a smooth process. It allows you to make operational and data-driven decisions, which gives your business a competitive edge and stability.
Insider secrets on business intelligence
Download our free Digital Marketing guide for restaurants.
Best business intelligence tools for your business
Restaurant business intelligence software takes a restaurant's data and then visualizes and analyzes the data. This provides restaurant owners with more insights into their performance and helps them make informed decisions. Based on this data, they get in-depth snapshots of specific aspects of your business. By housing all the data in a single place, information is easily organized and accessible for future uses.
Here are the top three business intelligence software solutions available.
Zip POS Dashboard
Zip POS dashboard, from HubWorks, is a simple, hassle-free business intelligence software meant for clean and understandable reports for POS systems. It integrates business information from a pre-existing POS system like PlumPOS to create standardized reports, thereby making better business decisions. It breaks down the data and helps managers or restaurant owners gain meaning from the data and act accordingly. Zip POS dashboard consolidates all the reports of net sales, sales per labor hour etc. Users can perform business performance analysis with automatically generated charts and graphs in the Zip POS dashboard. It is available for free with features like daily POS reports, weekly cash reports, data visualization, POS integrations, and so on.
Posist Cockpit
Posist Cockpit business intelligence software solution has been designed to provide insightful data and gain control over restaurant operations. It has an integrated analytics feature that provides the entire restaurant data in simple graphical formats. For restaurants with multiple outlets, this bi software integrates the entire sales data across different outlets, helping restaurant owners to make decisions fast. You can contact them personally to know about pricing and other features.
Restaurant 365
Restaurant 365 is a Business Intelligence solution that allows users to access financial data, food costs, sales, labor numbers, etc on a single platform. You can dissect data and view it in easy to use dashboard, allowing you to analyze the restaurant's performance and apply it to make better decisions that enhance revenue. It is suitable for both single and multi-outlet operations. Its basic plan starts at $289 which includes Inventory, Scheduling, and Account Payable capture features.
Ways to get more from your business intelligence solution
Your restaurant's Business Intelligence software is a valuable asset. It helps you make decisions, run your business more efficiently, and grow your customer base. However, you can get even more out of it by implementing the following tips.
The first step is to invest in a BI consultant. A professional consultant will be able to guide how to integrate the software with other systems and how to use the data it collects. The consultant will also identify areas where your business could benefit from data-driven decision making.
The next step is to provide your employees with training on how to make use of the solution's features such as dashboards, reports, or visualizations created with the software.
Finally, you need to find out what your competitors are doing and leverage their best practices for your success.
Business intelligence solutions for your business
Download our free Digital Marketing guide for restaurants.