Business Intelligence or how to turn your company's information into opportunities

Let's take a monumental literary work, for example, Tolstoy's War and Peace. We might view it as a huge database that collects the author's inspired output letter by letter. But let's say that you only have two hours to read the book, which is over 1,000 pages long. One possible solution would be to choose the best film version of the classic: here you will find, in a graphic and condensed form, all the relevant information to understand the essence of the work and its main messages in no time at all. 

This can be a metaphor for Business Intelligence (BI), a technology model that analyses the huge and growing masses of information in a company and transforms it into concentrated, simple conclusions about its meaning. These big data are then translated into easy-to-understand charts on status, performance, patterns or trends. Here the variety of data collection tends to infinity: these can be how, when, where and to whom each product is sold, person-to-person or departmental productivity curves, comprehensive information on internet traffic and online channels, the parameters of a marketing campaign, absenteeism or the benefit of human resources training, etc. 

Transparency is a further differentiating value. Prosegur AVOS monitors all activity and provides customers with dashboards so they can visualise and analyse the effectiveness of all processes and thus check their level of efficiency. For example, the productivity graphs of the agents dedicated to managing the wills and testament section of a bank, with parameters including, yet not limited to the hours dedicated to each task and file resolution times.     

Roberto Centeno points out that the relationship of trust with customers is crucial because the technology itself does not matter, what matters is how people use it. Any technical transformation starts with cultural change. According to the Client Solutions Manager, one of the biggest advantages of BI is the acceptance of the customer's human resources: "When they see it working and how it improves their work and their company in general, the resistance to this technological change is nil, zero".    

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In an increasingly complex business environment, it is more essential than ever to optimise the collection and management of information in order to turn it into data that provides value. Roberto Centeno recommends that companies opt for a next-generation BI model, capable of anticipating this digital evolution, centred on process automation (the technological trend that will lead the next technological revolution), with more attractive and useful dashboards (the interface that allows a user to visualise key information) and based on trust with the client to know what information they need to interpret and therefore the exact BI configuration for their case.

"This is the evolved model that we provide at Prosegur AVOS —points out Centeno—. We also bring in-depth knowledge of sectors such as banking and insurance. We assist each company personally, they tell us what they want and we do the rest, we work with their databases and streamline the entire transformation. They then only need propose some final adjustments for the final version of the dashboards".

This flexible BI aims at personalisation as a differential value, capable of adapting, for example, to banking institutions or other types of companies that have manual processes that cannot be 100% digital, such as processing cheques or physical documents. Whenever a procedure can be reconverted to make it simpler, more agile and operational for customers, Prosegur AVOS carries out the transformation, regardless of their degree of digitisation. 

"Information not only has to be had, it has to be understood. That is why it is called Business Intelligence: it is the art of transforming disaggregated information, which in its raw form is useless, into knowledge to understand what is really happening in the company and make the right decisions to make it more efficient and competitive", explains Roberto Centeno, Client Solutions Manager at Prosegur AVOS, Prosegur's business line specialising in digital transformation for the financial and insurance sectors, with robust expertise in BI. 

We are talking about accelerated digitisation, which is why BI has skyrocketed in strategic value in just a few months. Some reports are indisputable: For example, the consultancies HSF Research and KMPG International argue that, before the pandemic, emerging technologies such as process automation, artificial intelligence, smart analytics or multi-cloud were important for concrete benefits such as increasing revenues, reducing costs or improving decision-making. But after the impact of COVID, these technologies are now directly "essential for business survival". 

Digitisation will continue apace, not waiting for the laggards; it will continue to increase the volume of information in companies and, therefore, the need for BI to understand it and make the most of it. A study by MarketsandMakets Research predicted a 7.6% annual growth for the Business Intelligence market between 2020 and 2025 before the virus. An upward adjustment of this forecast would be reasonable today.