To steer successfully through today’s economy and handle the constant pressure of balancing cost reduction with compliance, your growing company needs business tools that provide intuitive insight into your performance. In fact, you need the same intuitive insight that large enterprises get to enjoy with enterprise business intelligence software.

Here are 5 things to look for in a Business Intelligence (BI) solution:

  1. Scalability:  Does the solution fit your business now – and have room to grow as you grow?
  2. Flexible reporting:  Does the solution offer a wide variety of standard reports – and the ability to create your own?
  3. Dashboards:  Is the software designed to provide managers with timely, coherent information on their areas of interest in an easy-to-digest format?
  4. Data integration and exploration:  Can you quickly drill down to get more details on a given data point? Hint: this requires full integration with all of your company’s other applications, such as finance, customer relationship management, and supply chain.
  5. Key performance metrics and management:  Can you continually measure your company’s performance against established benchmarks?

For additional thoughts on BI visit the third-party research group Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).