Summer 2023, the recession is here. Many companies are forced, or are preparing, to reduce their activity in order to survive, to recalculate their budgets and to slow down their investments.
At Uzinakod, we want to highlight a solution that will help you weather the crisis, and give you some good ideas for navigating through the pitfalls of these troubled times. We firmly believe that business intelligence can help you navigate the icebergs and economic maelstroms comfortably, or nearly so, and here’s how.
Maximise Your Potential With Business Intelligence
First of all, let’s go back to the fundamental question: what is business intelligence, and why use it? Business Intelligence (BI) is the set of processes by which raw data is transformed into usable information. It is a discipline that helps companies make decisions based on data, facts and calculated forecasts. The aim is to enable decision-makers to base their choices on reliable information. For more details on how BI works, see our colleague Yacine’s article entitled ”How to leverage the full potential of your data with business intelligence”.
BI is useful at all times. In times of growth, it helps to ensure that companies flourish both economically and in human terms. The dashboards designed by BI experts will provide the information needed for the smooth running of the business at different levels, from production to human resources, enabling harmonious development and smooth management.
In times of economic recession, businesses face unprecedented challenges. The pressure to maintain profitability and competitiveness is more intense than ever, and here again, BI is emerging as an essential tool to help them navigate these troubled waters and thrive despite difficult conditions.
How can BI help during a recession?
There are many ways in which BI can help your company in a recession. By giving companies greater visibility of their operations, finances and performance, business intelligence enables them to make informed and strategic decisions, even in a context as complicated as the one we are currently experiencing.
Here are a few solutions and concrete examples you can use:
- Providing accurate forecasts: this is a very general example, but the ability to accurately predict market trends and customer behaviours is crucial in times of recession. Business intelligence, supported by artificial intelligence, provides advanced tools and models for predictive analysis, enabling companies to make informed decisions and better plan their resources.
- Prioritise and reduce costs: by analysing financial data, Business Intelligence makes it possible both to prioritise the products by market that work best, and to target expenditure that could be reduced without losing end-user quality. In fact, BI analysts and experts can set up dashboards specifically designed to help you identify areas where savings could be made and thus optimise your profitability.
- Retaining customers: by accurately analysing your customers’ behaviour, BI can keep them engaged, maintain communication and indicate which accounts need special attention. This also leads to a better marketing strategy, because by knowing your customers’ patterns, you can better target the advertising that’s right for them.
- Reduce wasted time and materials: by automating and optimising processes, business intelligence can reduce wasted time. Material losses can also be reduced by managing the supply chain more effectively. This is essential for reducing costs and improving overall production efficiency. BI makes it possible to monitor and optimise this supply chain, identifying bottlenecks and finding ways to improve productivity.
- Identifying opportunities: while some see a recession as a time of crisis, others see it as a time of opportunity! Business intelligence helps companies identify these opportunities, whether in new markets, untapped customer segments or innovation strategies. It also enables them to keep a close eye on the competition and adapt quickly to market changes.
These are just a few examples, but there are of course dozens of other situations in which business intelligence can help a company suffer less from the recession, or even emerge stronger from it!
Driving Growth Through BI Integration: Key Steps for Success
All these points may seem very intuitive, but to implement them and really serve your business, you still need precise expertise. Note that BI engineers are trained to turn your needs into solutions, by translating all the questions you ask into queries in your data, then providing you with the answers via dashboards.
At Uzinakod, our BI experts can also be supported by artificial intelligence, IoT (Internet of Things) or custom software development to meet all your needs. They will help you determine an effective data strategy, propose clear dashboard models and, finally, establish a well-defined roadmap to bring your project to a successful conclusion.
The first step will involve analysing your data and proposing a model to extract the maximum amount of information from it. Then, depending on the needs you have expressed, we will set up dashboards to give you access to the answers you need. We’ll help you get the most out of them, and remain at your disposal for any improvements or new functionality you may require.
Business Intelligence can be used to solve a wide variety of problems in many areas of business, including some that you might never have imagined! At the Connexion trade fair held in Montreal in mid-May 2023, Uzinakod presented a conference on the theme of “How to combine AI and BI to maximise the added value of your business”, based on a concrete example: a car garage. We demonstrated how BI and AI together helped to overcome the various obstacles encountered by its employees.
Conclusion
In times of recession, business intelligence is proving to be a strategic asset for companies. It enables them to understand their business environment, make decisions based on reliable data and seize opportunities as they arise.
By investing in robust BI solutions, businesses can not only survive a recession, but thrive and position themselves favourably for economic recovery. So now is not the time to cut your BI budget, but to use this powerful tool to guide your choices and optimise your decisions.
If you were waiting for a sign to contact us, here it is! Don’t wait any longer, we’d be delighted to discuss strategies and optimisation with you. Our experts will make it a point of honour to pamper your data and extract its full potential!
