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A software BI tool gives you a wealth of insights you can use to optimize your expenses and forecast your revenue. In short, BI is what gives you control over your company’s profitability.
Why is using BI software worth it? Here are the 3 most important insights you can get from business intelligence analytics software.
What is a software BI solution?
Business intelligence (BI) solutions process, analyze, and report on data to help managers make smarter business decisions.
Such software can integrate data from multiple sources, use AI for analysis, deliver both scheduled and ad hoc reporting, and visualize data using handy charts and graphs.
Some types of BI software also allow creating advanced financial forecasts and simulations to keep project and company profitability in check and control the performance of your teams.
So, what type of insights can a BI solution give you, and why are they important?
3 insights you can get from a software BI solution
Insight 1: How to scale your business and teams
A business intelligence solution gives you a high-level, bird’s eye view of your financial performance - not only at the level of individual projects but your entire project portfolio.
Revenue per developer
Knowing what type of developers brings you the greatest revenue (per technology) is a key insight BI software gives you.
Check your revenue per developer metric and you’ll understand whether scaling your team makes sense at the moment. By analyzing the demand for specific skills, you can forecast how much more you will earn if you hire more developers.
Moreover, you can use these insights to set the general strategy for your business. Are you going to specialize in a narrow range of skills or develop a more general approach?
Resource allocation
By combining data about future project requirements with the allocation of your current employees, you can improve your planning for both sales and HR.
Your sales team will know what type of projects to focus on acquiring and when. That’s because they’ll have a clear idea about which resources will become available and when specific projects come to an end.
And your HR team will know when it’s time to new people and what skills they should focus on in the next few months.
Planning recruitment over the long term gives you the comfort of knowing that once an exciting project makes your way, you have the resources to take it in thanks to a solid pipeline of candidates.
Example:
The sales department approaches you and informs you that your company has an 80% probability of acquiring a new project. After you've determined the initial time and financial estimates, you'll need to identify personnel who can carry it out.
You found the right people, so what do you do now? You can plan them in your software platform or on a spreadsheet, but you'll see that the amount of anticipated disposal has grown.
What if your client chooses a different provider, and the people we intended to work on this project are suddenly not assigned anywhere? Your utilization rate will plummet dramatically.
Primetric allows booking and drafting of individuals for projects, but also creating uncertain projects to avoid such shocks. You can see reservations for certain projects and drafts for uncertain projects that haven’t been confirmed by the sales dept yet.
The three icons next to Assignments means as follows: black - draft project, yellow - reserved project, green - active project.
Insight 2: How to optimize your resources
Smarter management
Enhanced management means using your resources better. It’s like achieving more with less.
It increases your capacity and potentially allows you to onboard more clients because your resources are used more efficiently.
Your costs will stay the same, but revenue will increase. Doesn’t it sound like a dream?
Example: Achieving optimal resource utilization
Randomly allocating all available resources doesn’t guarantee profitability. Only smart employee utilization does.
If you don’t have visibility into this, your most valuable employees might be assigned to non-billable or uninteresting operational activities.
BI and resource allocation software help to identify the best prospects while also preventing under or overallocation in advance. Typically, IT businesses strive for a 70-80% usage rate.
Better cost forecasting
BI software lets you add organizational overhead to your simulations and check how your costs will change as you scale your business.
You’ll know whether you should increase your hourly rate for clients thanks to this long-term approach to planning.
You’ll also check whether your projects are profitable and what their profit margin is. These insights will direct you in making smarter decisions about the best forms of settlement for your company - per project, developer, retainer, or something else that gives you the profitability you want.
Example: Forecasting project profitability
Quality BI software lets you forecast project margins and the overall profitability of your projects (and the entire company!).
You can use it to create cash flow simulations and predictions depending on the kind of incoming projects (tentative or booked/scheduled).
Insight 3: Knowing where your low hanging fruit is
What you can do immediately to achieve a higher revenue this month or quarter?
Looking at insights from Business Intelligence analytics software gives you this answer.
For example, let’s say that you have a Python developer sitting on the bench and working on some internal project. Knowing that you can instantly send a note to the sales team to start looking for a company missing a Python pro in their team.
This type of fast decision-making only works if you can back it up with solid data.
Try Business Intelligence analytics software and see for yourself
Want to know how BI software delivers all these insights? Book a demo with me to see how Primetric generates forecasts, reports, and visualizations to empower managers in their daily work.
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