Business Intelligence (BI) is exactly what it sounds like: the data that lets your business run intelligently. Every organization, regardless of its IT budget, can (and should) aggregate and analyze raw data about their business and then use it to make insightful, tactical decisions. Without effective use of your BI, you’ll be taking shots in the dark, one right after another.  As this article will detail, one way to get the most out of your BI is by creating custom BI dashboards and inventory reporting in Zoho Analytics. Check out one of our other Zoho articles if you’d like to learn more!

According to The Starter Guide to Business Intelligence, BI is an indispensable resource that, when used wisely, can:

• • Provide answers to critical business questions
  • Ensure alignment between activities and strategy
  • Reduce time spent on data entry and manipulation
  • Provide in-depth, real-time insights into customers
  • Benchmark your data against that of competitors and against your historical data for continuous improvements
  • Identify areas to cut costs and to allocate budget
  • Boost internal productivity by spending time on what’s important

BI tools transform raw data into meaningful and digestible information via data warehouses, data discovery tools, cloud data services, reports, and dashboards. The very best BI tools, however, truly democratize your data. This lets anyone in your organization easily extract insights and create value from BI reporting. If you want to understand your holistic business health, you must pull data from a wide range of sources. Then, make that data digestible to everyone in your organization and on any device. Luckily, Zoho Analytics does this with its varied performance indicators, collaborative toolkit, and cross-functional reports and dashboards. 

Zoho Analytics: A Self-Service BI and Analytics Platform

Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and data analytics software that allows you to analyze your data and create accessible data visualizations in minutes. It tracks key business metrics across departments and then identifies long-term trends and outliers to unearth critical insights. And, it does this using actionable reports and dashboards that blend data from multiple sources inside and outside your organization. 

Zoho is user-friendly, with a drag-and-drop tool that can build out different visualizations in order to highlight different insights. Artificial intelligence powers these analytics, and you can ask intelligence assistant Zia any questions you have. Answers will come in the form of forecast trends or automated reports. You can then collaborate online by sharing these reports with colleagues and discussing them within secure conversations. You can even embed the BI tool and analytics in your own brand name. This will seamlessly weave it into your own product, application, portal, or website.

Check out the most recent Zoho Analytics update here. 

Creating Custom Inventory Reports in Zoho Analytics

Integrating your inventory management system with Zoho Analytics allows you to track data around products, inventory, orders, and sales. It helps you optimize your stock handling and make data-driven decisions by analyzing your sales orders, invoices, and highest and lowest selling products. Even better, this data can be blended with Zoho CRM to help you understand your customers’ preferences and plan your inventory accordingly. 

We recently completed a project where we created inventory reporting in Zoho Analytics. Our client lacked the tools to identify whether they would have enough inventory to meet customer demand in several months. Even worse, their reporting method didn’t account for the fluctuations and seasonal changes that affected their industry. Our client did have numerous data sets, which they knew were related. However, they didn’t know how to make the connections needed to build the reports. This was where we came in.

We built SQL query tables that could connect various types of records and then blend financial and operational data into one unified display. We then added the client’s budget projections as a data source, so that the user could quickly judge their performance and identify potential inventory shortfalls. In the end, our client got increased visibility into their performance without spending lots of time gathering and analyzing data from various sources. All of the reports are compiled into 4 separate dashboards in Zoho Analytics. Some of these reports were simple, others were very complex. 

So, while Zoho Analytics comes packed with great out-of-the-box features, you can also create bespoke or tailored reports to better suit your business needs. To receive a free 30-minute Zoho consultation, Contact us.