A good BI solution should support your organisation through a structured process.This consists of the following phases:

1. Design
2. Shaping
3. Modelling
4. Visualisation

BI solutions drive high-level discussions to make meaningful strategic decisions. An ERP software however, is a system used to generate an exact operational view of your organisation, often without trend analysis, data comparison, or insights generation. While BI solutions provide strategic analytics, an ERP solution provides transactional, operational analytics.

Until a few years ago, accessing, modelling, visualising and reporting the information required by businesses would have been out of the reach of all but the large corporates. Today, cloud technologies have driven down the costs of implementing BI solutions making them much more accessible for small to medium sized businesses. So, YES you can afford BI software even at the stage of small/medium business.

Gain insight for growth. This is the main definition of BI. You can optimize business intelligence for sales opportunities, lead generation, market analysis, customer segmentation, etc. ... Among others, you can identify growth areas, assess supply and demand, measure product viability and determine your market position.

Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data warehouse or data mart.

A business intelligence platform enables businesses to utilize existing data architecture and create custom business intelligence applications that make information available for analysts to query and visualize. Modern business intelligence platforms support self-service analytics, making it easy for end users to create their own dashboards and reports.

Business Intelligence software that are free and very easy to use are:-

• Tableau
• Zoho Analytics
• Salesforce
• SAP Analytics
• Sigma
• and many more..