Why Your Company Needs a Business Intelligence Solution or Smart Management?
Source: Äri-IT Autumn 2025
Author: Tarvo Tikand, Head of BI Field, BCS Itera
The quality of information-based business decisions significantly depends on the methodology and level of information acquisition, ranging from detailed data to the highest level of analysis-driven conclusions.
It can be stated with full conviction that most business decisions within a company are made based on information. However, the most crucial aspect is how that information is acquired. It is on this question that opinions and experiences diverge. Simply explained, the reason is that information exists on multiple levels, with the lowest level being raw data and the highest being conclusions drawn from data analysis.
Acquiring lower-level information is not a major issue today; you need to use competent business management software, and the necessary information (asset status at a certain time, sales over a period, debts, etc.) is always available in the form of various reports. It is important to emphasize that at this level, we cannot yet speak of a Business Intelligence solution. The reason is simple: business management software reports do not answer the question why?; they do not offer comparisons or show trends. Furthermore, many managers do not create the business management software reports themselves.
Smart and Fast Decisions Require Quality Analysis of Valuable Information
It is clear that no manager can operate without data analysis. The way this analysis is performed is extremely important. Business management software alone does not offer ready-made analysis—reports are compiled manually in Excel after data has been imported from the system. This is done step-by-step, as data can generally only be queried for one company and one period at a time. Forecasts and budgets reside in separate files, and so on.
The biggest problems with this workflow are the time consumption and the inevitable errors that accompany manual compilation. While Excel is a powerful tool, it is also very vulnerable—it only takes accidentally deleting a formula or copying incorrect data for the result to become skewed.
Less Manual Work, Higher Quality, A Single Source of Truth
A BI solution that relies on business management software data can quickly and automatically turn data into reliable information. Valued data is a company’s crucial asset because it allows for the maximum utilization of all available information about customers, the market, and the company’s own operations.
A Business Intelligence solution has three strong and necessary functions:
- Management Reporting: Continuous readiness and automatic updates, as well as sharing reports with the right employees according to their roles and permissions.
- Analysis Tool: The ability to delve into data time series, search for connections and trends, create new unique ratios, and uncover the story hidden behind the data.
- Data Quality Assurance: We recommend creating control reports that help find and correct inconsistencies (e.g., poorly linked sales and purchase invoices).
BI solutions are centrally managed, which ensures the use and comparison of uniformly agreed-upon financial data. The result is a single source of truth, not five versions of it.
Data-Driven Management Enables Company Growth
A Business Intelligence solution is not just an ”IT department toy.” As a company grows, data management becomes increasingly complex. The sooner a company realizes the need for a scalable and future-proof BI solution, the better. Our experience shows that all solutions that serve only one report and are neither scalable nor extendable to other questions require rebuilding or the creation of an auxiliary parallel report when new needs arise. A company might believe that its reporting has functioned well and been stable for decades, but this may not account for market changes or new customer expectations. Business Intelligence is never final and complete—it must continuously evolve.
A well-implemented and scalable BI solution enables the company to make better data-driven decisions, increases competitiveness, and grows the company’s value.
BCS Itera offers both simpler Power BI solutions and more complex Data Warehouse solutions for data valuation, with Power BI reports and Excel as potential outputs. The advantages of simpler solutions include quick implementation, simplicity of models, and low cost. Potential drawbacks include limitations on the size of models and data tables, which can lead to the data volume becoming too large over time, and data refreshing potentially stopping at the most crucial moment. The Data Warehouse does not have such limitations. A Data Warehouse is a technology that collects data from various sources, enriches it through transformations (e.g., cleaning, aggregation, and standardization), and provides users access in a clear and understandable format via business analysis tools (e.g., Power BI and Excel).
Correctly collected and valued data turns into valuable information that enables smarter, data-driven management decisions.