Nowadays, the dynamic business environment demands companies to be always one step ahead to stay competitive. It is not enough to be just good at what you are offering, you need to consider more factors than ever before. Fortunately, businesses have a trustworthy ally in the face of their data, which can help them define the current reality, enlighten why things happen as they do and predict what the future may look like.
In the following article, we are going to discuss two different types of solutions that can help you grow your business with the power of data analytics – Modelling & Planning and Business Intelligence.
Difference between Modelling & Planning and BI solutions
Business models describe what products and/or services the business plans to produce and how it intends to do it, including what costs will be incurred while the business plan outlines the goals of the company and how it will achieve them. Strategic business planning is one of the most common areas where the combination of modelling and planning can provide a higher value for the organization.
Modelling and Planning solutions combine forecasting of different scenarios with actions that should be taken in case they occur. Good planning can save companies resources and reduce risks as it provides them with guidance on what steps they need to take to achieve a specific goal or make a profit.
On the other hand, Business Intelligence (BI) includes “the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.” BI solutions extract valuable insights from vast unstructured data and transform them into meaningful information. Using the provided insights to make strategic decisions, companies can optimize operational efficiency and enhance productivity.
Although both Modelling & Planning and Business Intelligence solutions can provide you with data analytics, they are designed to satisfy quite different needs and purposes. The functionalities of systems for Modelling and Planning make them extremely useful when it comes to budgeting, business planning and forecasting.
Based on data, they can create and analyze several potential scenarios – such as baseline, conservative and aggressive, revenue growth, price changes or market expansion and show their financial impact. In contrast, BI is about improving the organization as a whole by transforming its data to insights into its business processes.
The data analytics BI provides, can then be used by the organization to make strategic business decisions that improve productivity, increase revenue and accelerate growth. BI encompasses a wide variety of tools that enable companies to extract data from both internal and external sources, transform it for analysis and create reports, dashboards and other data visualizations to help decision-makers take the best course of action.
