How IoT Can Be Connected to Business Intelligence

IoT solutions as well as Business Intelligence tools are widely used by companies all over the world to improve their processes. But what if we combine these technologies? Will it make sense? There can’t be other answers apart from “Yes”. In this article, we offer you to have a look at how it can be done and provide you with step-by-step instructions.

BI and IoT are a perfect duo as while IoT devices can gather important data in a real team, BI software is intended for processing and visualizing this information. As a result, companies and organizations have the possibility to enjoy the highest value of the recorded data and efficiently use it for making decisions and creating business plans and strategies.

Step-by-step plan for integrating BI with IoT systems

As the demand for IoT apps development is gradually growing from the side of companies that work in a wide range of industries, it is obvious that businesses of absolutely different types and sizes may have a necessity to ensure the connection of these tools with Business Intelligence. And below you can find a universal plan for it.

Step 1. Prepare a plan

First of all, you need to define what data should be collected from your IoT devices, processed, and visualized. For example, retail shops and supermarkets may need to analyze the stock of products, buyers’ preferences, and their behavior. That’s why shelves and other trading equipment can be enriched with various smart sensors. The gathered data is usually sent to a single IoT platform for further processing. After that, managers can get access to detailed reports that cover all the required aspects.

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Every company should clearly understand and plan in detail how the received data will be used further, how it can be distributed, and who will get access to it.

Step 2. Ensure cloud data storage

For enjoying all the benefits that IoT technologies can offer us today, it is vital to find a place where all the gathered data will be kept. Usually, companies choose a platform provided by one of the most well-known vendors like Amazon (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.

All these services offer special tools that help to visualize the stored data in a convenient format.

Step 3. Find the way to work with IoT data in the most efficient way

All the data that is sent to the cloud platform remains static. But it’s highly likely that you do not want to see just boring statistics and numbers. That’s why you need to find a way to train the data that will make it work as you need.

Today there are various tools that rely on ML and AI technologies which help them to understand the received data and further present them in a convenient format. Thanks to such tools it will be much easier for you to visualize all these piles of numbers that you get from IoT devices.

Step 4. Proceed to data analysis

Many analytics programs that are offered by cloud service providers can prepare all the information in such a way that it will be fully ready for visualization. Thanks to these tools you can find any information you need to make the analysis as efficient as possible. Moreover, the analytics capacities of such tools are also quite impressive which provides businesses with wide opportunities in understanding their own data.

Especially, such analytics tools can be of great use for manufacturing companies that always have to deal with huge volumes of data. And this data can be rather challenging for being interpreted manually. 

If you can’t find any suitable analytics tools among those that are available in the market, you can always order the development of a custom solution that will be fully tailored to the needs of your organization.

Step 5. Visualize all the data received from IoT sensors

When you have prepared everything that is required for further visualization, it’s high time to do it. Now it will be possible to transform your data into a format that will be useful for you and that will be easy to read and understand. Business intelligence tools can help you with this task. 

Today there are a lot of BI solutions that unite various types of visualization tools that can take the data from numerous storages in different formats and further present them in such a view that will be comfortable for users. You will have the possibility to choose whether you want your data to be presented in a graph, chart, table, etc.

Final word

Without any doubt, thanks to such solutions, data interpretation takes significantly less time than in those cases when all these processes are executed manually. That’s why if you need to use data collected by IoT devices for your strategic decisions, we strongly recommend you consider the possibility to connect your IoT system with business intelligence.