6 Signs You Should Ditch Excel for a Business Intelligence Solution
Microsoft Excel (and spreadsheets in general) features on everybody's list of the best inventions of the 21st century, along with self-driving cars and artificial pancreas. Okay maybe that’s a bit too exaggerated. Regardless, there is no denying what Excel has done for businesses and individuals worldwide. With an initial focus on accountants, Excel has found applications in many other fields including engineering, data science, research, marketing, banking, medicine; attracting over 800million users worldwide.
Despite the mighty power that Excel offers, the most recent trends in business analytics and reporting require the flexibility, speed the agility that Excel falls short of providing. Today’s business reporting requirements demand a level of sophistication that Excel and most spreadsheets are not intended for.
Perhaps completely ditching Excel or your favourite spreadsheet application may not be an option for your business for the foreseeable future. However, there are several clear signs that will tell you its time to adopt a more sophisticated solution for your business analytics and reporting. The good thing is you won’t have to look too far for this kind of sophistication, thanks to business intelligence (BI). Common to most BI tools are the ability to accommodate large amounts of data in a variety of formats, self-provision via the cloud or on-premise deployment and the simplicity of visual querying.
This article shares 6 signs that indicate that it might be time to consider business intelligence to drive your reporting and overall decision making.
1. Reports Are Being Emailed Back And Fourth (with complex version numbers)
If you find yourself in the middle of an email conversation that has Quarterly Report Draft v1.1.10.1 as an attachment, then its probably time for your business to share and track better via a BI tool. You might think cloud SaaS provisions such as Google Docs are the answer to your collaboration and sharing woes in this case but am afraid these will not offer you total control over your reporting. Further, with emailed reports comes manual version control that indicates who did what, why and when and this can become messy very quickly. Most BI tools offer the versatility to work and share on-premise or via the cloud, while giving you total control over your analyses and reporting. Such flexibility allows businesses to share and collaborate easily without the headache of manual version tracking.
2. Reports Jump Over Multiple Desks to Take Shape
Most traditional business reporting is done in silos, requiring a single employee to play the role of the data source, analyst, report author and sometimes, graphics designer. Trending business requirements hardly make reporting a single-man job and requires the collaborative effort of a cross-functional team. In modern business, a single non-trivial report will require the expertise of an analyst, BI specialist and IT before it lands on the desk of your favourite C-level boss. In that scenario, it would not be advisable to execute your reporting pipeline via email and flash drives. A wiser choice is to consider deploying a BI tool to ease collaboration and to streamline the reporting process.
3. Your Excel Formulas And Macros Are Getting Too Complicated
Most businesses have that one Excel file with complicated formulas and macros that only Jimmy from accounts understands (because as a self-taught Excel expert, he designed it all by himself). Once Jimmy quits because he found his calling in playing the banjo, the whole reporting pipeline collapses. If one of these days your business finds itself in such a situation, it is clear that you are in dire need of a BI tool, preferably one that offers self-service. Self-service business intelligence tools allow non-technical users to run complicated data transformations, analyses and visualizations at a click of a button without the need to record macros, write ode or complex formulas. Self-service business intelligence tools include Qlick, Tableau, IBM Cognos and Microsoft’s PowerBI.
4. You Need Multiple Data Sources for Your Reporting
One thing that BI tools are good at is the ability to integrate large amounts of data from a wide variety of sources including text files, databases, websites and APIs. This is some magic that Excel is not built for. Most spreadsheet apps assume you are bringing in clean and complete data and they take it from there. However, the truth is data usually comes with issues and from different directions. If this is where you are in your business, a business intelligence strategy may not be a bad idea at all.
5. The Reporting Period is the Busiest Time of the Quarter
This is the general trend for most businesses and it is normal, only for those that have not discovered business intelligence. BI is an on-going, dynamic and real-time reporting process that presents timely insights. This continuity has the effect of spreading the workload evenly along the reporting period and hence no specific period is rendered busier than the other. Having a BI deployment will very likely free up Jimmy from accounts in time for his banjo practice session even during what is supposed to be the busiest time of the year.
6. You Don't Know What You Are Looking for But You Want It
You know you want it, but you cannot explain what it is. Yes it sounds like nonsense but it is the exact problem that data mining is intended to solve. Data mining is a technique used by most business intelligence tools that works on large sets of diverse structured and unstructured data (big data) to discover interesting trends and patterns that are critical to your business. As the saying goes, there are (juicy) secrets that your data is keeping and the right questions and technique will make it confess! Could that technique be business intelligence?
Conclusion
The utility of Excel cannot be denied and it will continue to occupy a seat at the enterprise application table. However, business reporting needs have evolved beyond the 1 million rows and 16,000 columns that Excel can handle. Once your reporting needs begin to turn into a burden, its time for your business to adapt and business intelligence is that next level of sophistication that your business needs.
PS:
Contact the good guys at Bintel Analytics for your business intelligence strategy and free advisory.
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