Unstructured Data Extraction Solution and Business Intelligence

With a surge in digitization of the world in the 21^st Century, companies have been getting unprecedented amount of data. Buyers have become informed, and it requires Companies to target them more accurately and according to their needs. The subsequent surge of data from multiple touchpoints and sources have drastically increased the need for Business intelligence.

Importance Of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is combining the processes of data mining, business analytics, and data visualization to help the organization make more informed and data-driven decisions. It allows you to have a much more wholistic and comprehensive view of the organization’s data & performance.

BI can help companies better adapt to near-future scenarios and supply/demand changes. In this competitive landscape, having an effective business intelligence allows organizations to analyze their consumer behavior and enhance their offerings timely, and stay ahead of competition.

To this end, an embedded business intelligence process would also be a powerful tool and be of greater importance for companies by allowing them to make better decisions and analyze data more deeply.

How Business intelligence Works

All organizations have goals and business objectives. To track these goals and their performance, you can utilize OKRs business analysts gather necessary data, identify & analyze crucial patterns, and determine the course of future action. Business intelligence can help organizations make smarter decisions, identify ways to Improve profits, etc.

What is Unstructured Data

Unstructured data is where information is stored without any set model or format, and thus cannot be stored in a relational database. There are several types of unstructured data, such as text files, PDFs, email messages, images, multimedia, etc. Almost 80-90% of the information generated and collected by organizations is in the form of unstructured data, and its only growing. They store huge amounts of useful information which can be crucial in business decisions, however, it’s difficult to extract and analyze data through these file formats.

Nonetheless, with the advancements in AI and technology, more advanced software tools are entering in the market which allows users to easily extract the desired information from unstructured data formats. These software tools, now play a crucial role in the process of business intelligence.

Pre-requisites to begin Business Intelligence

In this digital era, and specially following the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses have widely adopted the digital model. With high competition level, companies realize the need for collecting maximum amount of data on their potential customers and, analyze the behavior and trends that their data represents.

However, usually a major part of the data collected, is in unstructured data format such as PDF documents. The crucial information pieces are trapped within these files and without converting that information into a structured format, the data cannot be analyzed. Moreover, the data is in such bulk quantity that it takes forever to manually extract the data and enter a structured file format. This job is laborious as well as time-consuming. Given how fast the digital landscape is changing and how customer preferences keep varying, Businesses need to get their data ready for analysis in a timely and efficient manner.

There are many free online tools that can help you in extracting data from a Pdf file. However, there is a limitation as well. Those tools can support your data extraction process for only a small number of unstructured documents you might have. With data coming in continuously into the organization, there needs to be a proper data extraction solution for it. A solution that can single handedly carry out the data extraction process for all the unstructured data coming in. Visit Astera.com to learn more about their data extraction solution

Bulk data extraction can be a cumbersome process, but fortunately, there are some data extraction solutions in the market that are specifically built to cater such needs and simplify the process. A good data extraction solution would have all the benefits listed down below.

Best Data Extraction Solution:

A data extraction solution must have these functionalities to be worth the spending.

1. Code-free:

Data extraction otherwise requires a lot of repetitive coding for each report to be extracted since they are not replicable. This makes the procedure inherently slow. A data extraction solution should have a code-free interface where the user can make a report model, and the extraction would then be done by the software itself cutting down the time of writing long scripts of codes completely.

2. Replicable Report Models:

A good data extraction solution should be able to reuse and replicate report models for reports following the similar report pattern. A single report model can then be deployed for all the reports of a similar pattern. For example, a company’s receives purchases orders on a daily basis with details in pdf formats. As the pattern of all the orders is the same, a single report model can be deployed to extract the data from every purchase order, transform into structured format, and store in the desired location.

3. Automation

It should allow the user to automate the extraction process by providing scheduling feature so that whenever a file drops in the system, the process triggers itself and the job runs automatically, transforming the data into structured format and storing in the set directory.

How does it Help in Business Intelligence?

Using a data extraction solution is extremely beneficial when it comes to BI. I have listed a few main benefits below.

• Data Accuracy:

The whole basis of BI depends mainly upon the data you are feeding into it. Data inaccuracies are likely to occur if the data extraction process is done manually. However, data extraction solutions eliminate running the risk of inaccurate data because of their data quality rules. Thus, data extraction software makes your BI more reliable.

• Faster time to insights:

A Data extraction solution reduce the time taken in data extraction from days to hours due to their codeless interface and robust performance. This allows the data to be ready for analysis earlier and you can get faster to crucial insights. Learn more here.

Conclusion

Overall, data extraction is critical in every company, and selecting the right data extraction solution is an important part of that. Data extraction tools make the life easier for businesses by cutting down the time and effort from a 10 men job to a single man job.