Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the set of methods, tools and processes used to collect, consolidate, analyze and present a company's data in order to inform decision-making. Its purpose is to turn raw data, often scattered across several pieces of software and several departments, into reliable, readable information for executives and operational teams alike.
A BI pipeline starts from heterogeneous sources — sales, stock, accounting, human resources — and centralizes them, historically in a data warehouse fed by extract, transform and load processes. The consolidated data is then presented as indicators, interactive dashboards and charts that the user can explore (filtering, zooming, views by period or by site). A distinction is drawn between descriptive BI, which explains what happened, and predictive analytics, which seeks to anticipate trends.
For a small or mid-sized business, BI shifts management from gut feeling and parallel spreadsheets to a shared, fact-based view: tracking revenue trends, spotting at-risk customers, ranking products by value, measuring equipment reliability or anticipating cash flow. KPIs are the building blocks that BI organizes and showcases in these dashboards.
When the data already lives in an ERP, BI can build directly on that foundation, with no re-keying or duplicate entry. eyeot's cross-module intelligence illustrates this approach: it continuously aggregates signals from the various modules (CRM, stock, maintenance, finance, purchasing) and produces ready-to-use scores — customer health, ABC stock classification, MTBF/MTTR indicators — computed read-only, following deterministic, explainable rules rather than a black box.