Table of Contents
- The Growing Data Challenge in E-Commerce
- Why Excel is No Longer Enough
- Manual Processes and Errors
- Scalability Issues
- Lack of Real-Time Insights
3. 4 Major Reasons for Upscale Business Intelligence Tools
- Enhanced Decision-Making
- Improved Inventory Management
- Gaining Customer Insights
- Boosting Operational Efficiency
- Case Study: E-Commerce Business Transition from Excel to BI
E-commerce handles massive amounts of data. They deal with everything from purchase records and shopper behavior to stock levels and ad performance stats. Today, businesses are swamped with information. Excel has served as a reliable life raft but in today’s quick-moving market, it’s starting to sink. What’s the next move?
As businesses constantly evolve, they need to shift from basic spreadsheets to smart instant decision-making systems that can do more than just storing information. This is where Business Intelligence (BI) software steps in helping e-commerce businesses to turn raw numbers into a competitive edge.
In this blog we will explore 4 major reasons why e-commerce businesses are moving from Excel to advanced business intelligence tools
Disadvantages of Excel
- Manual Processes and Errors:
Managing large datasets in Excel often involves manual data entry and complex formulas, increasing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. - Scalability:
With businesses growing day by day, excel struggles to handle large volume of data efficiently. For example, excel has file size cap of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per sheet which might be difficult for large datasets. - Lack of Real-Time Insights:
Excel doesn’t support real-time data updates which makes it difficult to access up-to-date information promptly. Relying on outdated information may lead to inefficiencies.
4 Major reasons to Upscale to Business Intelligence Tools
- Enhanced decision making:
Spreadsheets often fall short in providing up-to-date information, because the data we get is not based on real-time insights. On the other hand, BI tools provide up-to-date and relevant information with the help of predictive analytics which helps businesses to make right decisions swiftly. - Inventory management:
Keeping track of stock levels can be tough when using spreadsheets if you have a lot of products. Tools that crunch numbers and show you trends can give you a heads-up on demand forecasting and what people might want to buy. This helps businesses keep just the right number of inventories in stock and helps reduce expenses spent storing it all. - Customer Insight:
Excels struggles with large datasets. Since customer data is collected on a large form from various sources it becomes difficult to handle this information. BI tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Looker analyze data from various touchpoints, helping businesses to segment their audience and personalize marketing efforts accordingly. - Improved Operational Efficiency:
Manual data handling in spreadsheets can be time-consuming and often causes error. BI tools automate data analysis and reporting, freeing up valuable time for strategic initiatives.
Real-life Example
An Indian online retailer switched from Excel reports to a Business Intelligence (BI) system to handle its fast-growing business. The company received gigabytes of data daily on inventory, sales, and finances. Due to this overload of data Excel couldn’t keep up for quick analysis.
As a solution the team from Prescience Decision Solution, set up a big data warehouse on AWS Redshift and made interactive dashboards with Qlik Sense. This gave the company an instant look at important performance numbers, how customers behaved, and how the business was doing.
Moving from Excel to BI tools helped teams work together better, do data work , find deeper insights, and make quicker, fact-based decisions. This helped in boosting sales, inventory control better, and increased profits.
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Conclusion
For today’s fast paced e-commerce business excel is no longer ging to be a go-to-tool. As data keeps growing, businesses need faster, smarter tools to stay ahead. Business Intelligence tools make it easier to understand data, make quick decisions, and grow efficiently.
At Prescience Decision Solutions, we provide AI and ML solutions across various industries, helping businesses stay ahead in the tech space. Our expertise spans analytics, business intelligence, and data engineering.
Additionally, with our expertise in business intelligence, we deliver data-driven solutions catering to specific data infrastructure and reporting requirements. Moreover, we analyze report usage, (access frequency and consumption patterns), to optimize insights and provide strategic advice on maximizing the value of generated insights.
Explore our customer success stories here.
Prescience Team
