This is the fourth post in our five-part series, Five Ways to Turn Business Data into Business Insight. We’ve previously looked at how dashboards can provide easy information access to your team members based on their specific roles, how self-service business intelligence (BI) and reporting can lighten the load on IT resources, and how mobile BI impacts users and IT. Today, we’ll discuss Big Data and its big implications on small and mid-sized business.

Transform Big Data into Your Next Big Idea

Is there a hotter topic or bigger buzzword than Big Data? The amount of data and the mind-blowing pace at which it’s being created is unprecedented, but without the tools that can make sense of it all, Big Data is just a lot of ones and zeroes. So how do you enrich your data with advanced analytics to create real insight and ideas?

With a business intelligence platform based entirely on the Microsoft stack including SQL Server, Office and SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics ERP gives every user the ability to analyze and manage a massive amount of data. This lets your team do real analysis on years of financial history, sales figures, cost structures, customer information, inventory levels and other business data and make sound projections about what you can expect in the weeks, months and years to come.

Taking analysis a step further, you can match your historical data with Bing’s maps and social search information, so you can take inventory price levels, for example, and match them against competitive prices, allowing you to analyze and plan more effectively. And with predictive analysis tools, you can identify your most profitable customers and products, allowing you to make valuable cross-sell and up-sell recommendations that improve both sales and customer satisfaction.

Your data is no good if it’s lying dormant on a server somewhere. Microsoft Dynamics lets you get at it and get into it, so you can create the big ideas that make Big Data such a big deal.

Don’t just take our word for it. Read how international learning organization, NCFE, makes sense of its data using Microsoft tools to create a 360-degree view of customer interactions.
Next time, we’ll make sense of the other tech buzzword—“the cloud”—to see how it applies to your BI and reporting. In the meantime, take a product test drive or learn more about buying and deploying a business solution from Microsoft.