There was a drop in turnover in October. Decisions must be made to tackle the situation. However in order to make the right decision, research must be done to discover why turnover had decreased and how it had decreased. What product range was affected? What countries, what regions? In the customer portfolios of which sales agent(s)? In which distribution segment? Do we have a similar drop every October? There are a number of questions to be asked and it is important to know how to respond to these questions in order to be in a position to make the right decision.

We can use a number of terms “business analysis tools and techniques”, or “decision support tools” or “business intelligence”, but basically we are referring to a number of I.T. solutions which allow us to analyze company data, in order to extract new reliable information on which decisions can be based, be these tactical or strategic.

A modern company stocks a huge volume of data on its information systems, however quite often, this very volume makes it difficult to make sense of the data, and to understand what the data represents: underlying trends, hidden strengths or weaknesses, everything we need to know to be able to make an informed decision.

As such, business analysis tools, before helping us to make a decision, help us to aboard data analysis in order to identify relevant macroscopic information hidden in the large volume of data.