Business intelligence (BI) can help companies be more efficient, spot areas for cost savings and identify new business opportunities. BI helps customers centralize, better access and get a better understanding of key business metrics such as sales and to predict future performance. BI encompasses a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers.