Enterprise Reporting vs. Business Intelligence

Your organization has many tools available to help it make decisions about its future, using data from the past and present. Enterprise reporting creates reports about specific business metrics, while business intelligence uses data to provide you with insights about your company’s potential future. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are considerable differences between them. 

What Is Enterprise Reporting? 

Enterprise reporting creates and distributes reports on business performance to an organization’s decision-makers. The reports may include metrics on key performance indicators (KPIs) or information gathered from the company’s daily activities. Some of the most commonly used metrics include financial data, employee productivity and marketing data. You can fully view your organization’s overall performance using enterprise reporting.

With enterprise reporting software, data about your business transforms into easy-to-read charts and graphs. The visualizations help your leadership team understand your company’s operations and the steps they can take to improve business performance.

What Are the Benefits of Enterprise Reporting?

Enterprise reporting offers multiple benefits to your organization. It works across industries and can scale up or down based on an organization’s size. When you add enterprise reporting to your workflows, your company can:

• Make better decisions: Enterprise reporting turns complex data into user-friendly graphs and charts and includes easy-to-access dashboards. With readily available information, your organization can make decisions that will lead to a better future.  
• Improve the customer experience: An enterprise reporting system should have a clean, accessible interface that provides direct access to the most relevant data. The more intuitive your enterprise reporting software is, the more likely your team will be to use it. 
• Increase productivity: Enterprise reporting systems facilitate the report-building process so your team spends less time creating reports. This system can also lead to an increase in productivity by identifying process gaps. Once you know where the gaps are, you can take steps to fill them in for maximum productivity. 
• Improve reporting: Enterprise reporting software can integrate with the rest of your organization’s software, creating more comprehensive reporting practices. The software is flexible enough to allow your company to adjust as it grows and evolves. Your company can stay up to date on technological advances with the right enterprise reporting system.

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is software that turns data into reports, charts, graphs and dashboards. Like enterprise reporting, business intelligence allows your organization to access various types of data in an accessible manner. You can analyze the data to measure your business’s performance. 

Business intelligence aims to enable organizations to examine data to gain insights and understand trends. With the insights you gain from business intelligence tools, you can detect market trends, identify problems or discover new business opportunities or revenue options.

What Are the Benefits of Business Intelligence?

Your organization can ask questions about its future through business intelligence and get easy-to-understand answers. You can make decisions for your organization based on data rather than a best guess. 

Using business intelligence, your organization can:

• Decode customer behavior: Based on your customer data, including their preferences and actions, you can tailor your products to an ever-evolving market or create stronger personas. 
• Improve return on investment (ROI): The data provided by business intelligence can help you improve your organization’s ROI by allowing you to adjust your resource allocation to meet specific goals.
• Improve business operations: The data insights you glean through business intelligence can help you improve overall operations by making improvements.

What Is the Difference Between Enterprise Reporting and Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence and enterprise reporting have several features in common and should go hand-in-hand. However, it’s also important to understand the distinctions between the two to get the most value from either. 

With enterprise reporting, you see what has happened with your organization. Your reports can highlight a data set or operation during a set period, such as daily orders or monthly sales. Using reports, you gain an understanding of a particular metric’s status. Based on the information in the report, your team can take specific action. 

Enterprise reporting shows you the past or present. Business intelligence shows you the past and helps you understand why certain incidents happened. Using the data from business intelligence, you can make changes to improve your business’s future.

While enterprise reporting and business intelligence are different, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible and often preferable to use both to gain the most actionable insight into your organization.  

Contact Prelude Services for Enterprise Reporting

Prelude Services partners with your organization for the long term to help you improve productivity and leverage technology. Prelude’s Enterprise Reporting (PER) system allows you to access comprehensive reporting and dashboard tools based on a data warehouse. To learn more about PER and the benefits of enterprise reporting and business intelligence, contact us today.