Power Grab: BI Tools Put Data to Work

Customer interactions, market trends, financial transactions—businesses collect and store immense amounts of data. Gathering that data has never been easier, but then what? The real challenge is making sense of it.

In fact, as data becomes increasingly essential to success, the risk of making decisions based on outdated or inaccurate information grows. 

Analysis and interpretation are the keys to unlocking the value of data, but spreadsheets and manual reporting can’t deliver the nuanced insights you need to streamline your workflow and accelerate growth. That’s why you may want to invest in a business intelligence (BI) tool—software designed to collect, analyze, report, and visualize data.

BI tools support real-time, data-informed strategic decisions. A BI tool that helps your team efficiently and accurately extract meaningful insights from complex datasets offers a significant advantage in the ongoing effort to nurture long-term customer relationships.

At The Lacek Group, for example, we’ve invested in BI tools for both our back-end infrastructure and front-end templates—reducing project hours by more than 30% and allowing us to deliver high-impact products for major global clients at a fraction of the cost. Streamlining these efforts creates time to pursue other meaningful opportunities for our existing clients and pursue innovative new client partnerships.

That’s what BI tools do for us. What can they do for your business? Let’s count the ways.

1. Competitive advantage through time savings

Let’s look at BI tools from a sales manager’s perspective. How are the stores in my region performing? the manager may regularly wonder. Sifting through sales reports and clicking between spreadsheets to track down each individual store’s performance is time consuming and creates a high potential for mistakes. Subsequently, those errors may lead to misguided decisions.

The biggest advantage of BI tools is their ability to process, collate, and analyze large amounts of data from multiple sources. While that advantage has a price tag, the initial investment in BI tools and appropriate infrastructure to automate processes yields significant returns—i.e., reducing manual effort and improving data accuracy.

BI tools combine powerful data processing with practical visualization functions that let users see data in new ways. This dual capability enables users to:

• Automate data integration, eliminating errors associated with manual data entry
• Centralize reporting and create a single source of truth
• Enable interactive filters and drill-down features to explore data in-depth and quickly gain meaningful insights
• Create reusable templates and dashboards, saving valuable time and ensuring consistency across reports

In 2024, our team modernized a legacy dashboard by overhauling the user experience and migrating it to the cloud. Harnessing the evolving capabilities of a BI tool helped us introduce new forecasting and scenario-planning views, integrate new datasets, and streamline the user experience. Today, the client’s BI-enabled dashboard offers usability, accessibility, and accuracy across the organization.

2. Data-driven decision-making and enhanced collaboration

BI tools deliver a wealth of data insights through advanced analytics. Instead of reinventing the wheel with each new market report, a robust reporting infrastructure can help your team pinpoint the source of past successes—and then build on them for continuous improvement. Features such as forecasting, trend detection, and AI-powered analytics enable businesses to anticipate market shifts, customer behaviors, and operational inefficiencies. These predictive capabilities allow teams to stay ahead of the competition by making proactive rather than reactive decisions.

Collaboration is a crucial component of successful initiatives, and BI tools allow teams to share reports and dashboards across departments. This ensures everyone is working with the most recent and most accurate data. Cloud integration makes it easy to access, update, and distribute reports in real time, fostering a culture of data-driven collaboration.

BI empowers businesses to provide clients with interactive reports tailored to their specific needs. For instance, a brand handling increased competition from existing rivals and new online retailers may suspect its performance varies across geographic markets. But that supposition doesn’t reflect a clear, data-driven understanding.

A dashboard created with a BI tool can provide a comprehensive view of sales performance in multiple regions. Imagine being able to access those insights on demand so your team is always working with the most up-to-date information. A basis in a tangible, accessible, and layered view of sales information offers opportunities to explore hunches grounded in data.

4. Data storytelling

BI tools let organizations bring data to life in new ways—and effectively communicate insights to stakeholders. A BI dashboard offers analysts a valuable shift in focus by alleviating the burden of wrestling with technical complexities.

Instead, analysts can spend more time and energy concentrating on the crucial task of data storytelling, i.e., translating data into a compelling narrative tailored to stakeholder needs. That’s a crucial way to increase internal efficiency while fueling data-informed strategic decisions that boost business performance.

BI tools can also support data sharing with customers in ways that strengthen their bonds with your brand. For example, Goodreads, a social media platform and online database, helps users discover, review, and track books they’ve read or want to read. In 2024, Goodreads launched a campaign celebrating users’ reading accomplishments with an email recapping the total books and pages read, longest book read, favorite genres, and progress against reading goals. This data-driven campaign delivered relevant, shareable information that was seamlessly personalized and engaging for users.

From interactive dashboards to automated reporting, BI tools streamline the entire data analysis process, allowing businesses to focus on strategy rather than hunting for insights from disparate data sources. As data complexity continues to grow, businesses that leverage BI tools will be better equipped to make smart decisions, save time, and gain a strategic advantage—paving the way toward future growth and innovation.

Has your team explored how BI tools could transform the way your business handles data?

Gene Sulewski, Hampton Hughes, and Tracie-Lynn Lamoreux are part of The Lacek Group’s Data Intelligence team. For more than 30 years, The Lacek Group has been perfecting the art and algorithms of brand devotion. We help world-class brands identify their highest-potential customers, engage them across channels throughout their lifecycles, personalize each relationship for optimal long-term results, and measure the true effectiveness of those efforts. The Lacek Group is an Ogilvy One company.