The impact of business intelligence and analytic tools in business performance

: the Acembex case study

Abstract

The aim of this Master’s Final Assessment (MFA) is to describe how the challenges proposed by Acembex were addressed and overcome, regarding the implementation of Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) tools in the company’s Treasury and Commercial Departments. Thus, the main goal of the internship was to analyse the tools used daily by employees and determine whether they could be improved or replaced by others with better performance. As such, the present MFA focuses on investigating the impact of BI&A tools on the company’s performance, by analysing the situation before the introduction of analytical tools and compare it with the performance of the company after introducing such instruments. At the same time, this analysis is complemented with a pre-classification of the company according to the criteria of Davenport (2018) on the degree of analytics implementation, to later allow the observation of the evolution according to this scale. This study is intended to evaluate the improvement that such tools can introduce in a company and what benefits, in quantitative terms, can come from it. Acembex does not have a strong analytical component; therefore, at an early stage of the internship, the objective was to structure, clean, work and standardize the collected data, to later extract information from it. This was accomplished with the aid of Descriptive Analytics tools such as dashboards and through optimisation techniques namely heuristic models. Far along, the main goal was to introduce these tools within the company’s daily decision-making process. As the study of the impact of the tools provided by BI&A on Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME) is not very extensive, this analysis is of extreme interest, considering that, in Portugal, this type of companies constitute the biggest percentage of Portuguese businesses. Consequently, and as the final purpose of this investigation, the analysis culminates in an assessment of the impact of analytical tools on the company’s performance, and whether they came to streamline its way of operating and attempt to quantify this evolution.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria Silva (Supervisor)