The term “business intelligence” is popping up in a lot of places these days, and for good reason. Business intelligence (BI) refers to the process of using technologies, applications, data, and best practices to streamline your business operations. The end goal of business intelligence is to support better decision making, which is ideal for a company dealing with reverse logistics.
BI Trends
Companies are increasingly seeing the benefits of incorporating business intelligence into their day-to-day operations, integrating historical data with projections and industry trends to determine the best course of action. The key is to have your BI integrated into a single platform so you can use both aspects—historical information and future trends—in the same place.
In addition, many companies would like managers and key leaders to be able to access information without the need for constant IT involvement, a kind of self-service business intelligence that allows your decision makers the ability to access information without the technical skills that used to be required to harvest data. The ability to slice and dice data, analyze with visualization tables, and find statistical analysis in a program with a user-friendly interface is essential in a fast-paced business environment.
Finding the Right Software
For most companies the only thing holding you back from achieving your BI goals is having the right software in place to make it easy on your team. Look for reverse logistics platforms that offer:
- Visibility and transparency as appropriate at every level, without the need for team members to dig to find information
- Analytics and visualization in every module, not just a reporting module that requires people to hunt for or create visualization tools from scratch
- Role-based permissions to allow your key decision makers the ability to monitor, see, change, and edit as needed so the right people are able to view the right information at the right time to make their decisions; this also protects sensitive data from getting out
- Customization to meet your specific needs as a business; every company is going to have a slightly different workflow or process when it comes to reverse logistics, and the ability to create a software program for everyone to work seamlessly at every step can significantly reduce downtime and delays
- Dashboard views to give everyone the most important data based on their role and their duties
- High-level views as well as the ability to narrow it down so your executive and management team can easily visualize big-picture data, while team members can see the details that allow them to get more done
In a fast-paced world, there is little room for mistakes, and having the right data at the right time for every member of your team can help you see the big picture as well as the day-to-day details in one centralized place to drive your organization forward. Find out more about how the ReverseLogix platform can help you incorporate BI in your reverse logistics processes.