Embedded Business Intelligence–What is it and Why Does it Matter?
Embedded BI describes the integration of reporting, data visualization, and interactive dashboards within an existing application. This powerful approach displays and manages information through a BI platform, which brings the power of business intelligence to your application, integrating it into the user’s interface and giving users more data and insights. BI platforms increase data visibility and enable informed, data-driven decision-making. But how does it work?
Embedded BI works by using embedded analytics, pieces of intelligence that allow you to integrate analytic content into your applications, products, websites, and portals. These analytics make it easier for end-users to access data and insights within your software. The platforms display and manage data for SaaS companies to facilitate customer engagement through many core features.
Embedded business intelligence has many features that benefit organizations and customers:
- Integration capabilities
- Seamless user experiences
- Customization features for brands and users
- Access to real-time data and analytics
- Data security and access control
- Scalability to handle increasing data volumes
- Data connectivity to understand a wide range of data sources
Embedded Business Intelligence: Why Use It?
Embedded business intelligence represents a significant advancement over traditional reporting methods. It improves the customer experience by giving customers more context and data within their applications and places data at users’ fingertips, meaning customers can make smarter decisions and feel empowered when using your products – but it has other advantages, too.
Among the several advantages of embedded business intelligence are:
- Companies that use embedded BI can identify issues in the customer experience and make necessary changes to improve customer satisfaction.
- Embedded BI enables real-time decision-making, letting you and your customers access real-time data within your application and allowing for data-driven decisions on the spot.
- This solution enhances the user experience by making analytics easily accessible to all users, regardless of their technical expertise or data skill set. The most effective embedded platforms are user-friendly and intuitive.
- Additionally, embedded BI lets you analyze customer behavior to glean valuable insights about interests, patterns, and trends. These insights can directly contribute to revenue growth by helping you identify new opportunities and optimize your offerings.
Essential Embedded BI Capabilities
There are many business intelligence platforms available for you to consider. That being said, not all embedded analytics solutions are built the same, and you'll find that some embedded BI tools don't have what you need to succeed, so always look out for some core capabilities.
Your business intelligence solution requires a few key capabilities:
- Accurate and interactive reports that let business users identify specific data to explore, navigate, and comprehend within the host application
- The ability to connect to big data like any JBDC or OBDC data source or data warehouse such as Snowflake, allowing your product teams to gain deeper insights
- Row level security and user authentication to create several dashboards for different users
- Options for in-app data integration and data processing to eliminate extra storage and reduce the time it takes to achieve data-driven results
- A no-code builder to open up data analytics to all application users, making it easier for non-technical staff and preventing a steep learning curve
- Data storytelling capabilities to present data with a compelling narrative for increased usage and higher adoption rates, embedding insights naturally within the user's day-to-day workflow
What are the benefits of embedded BI?
While you might be new to the world of embedded BI, there are several key reasons to choose this solution, and embedded BI offers advantages to companies across industries. When you choose the right option, embedded BI becomes an invaluable addition to your business, unlocking some vital benefits for you:
It Delivers an Engaging and Interactive Experience
One of the biggest reasons companies choose embedded BI is because the solution consistently delivers an engaging customer-facing experience. These tools let employees leverage business intelligence to collect key data and embed it into applications and customer-facing software. By using embedded business intelligence, you create a user experience that's more interactive, enjoyable, and helpful for your top customers, making them feel valued.
It Provides Self-Service Reporting
With embedded BI, clients can access self-service reporting and find answers to all their questions within your BI platform – meaning better customer experiences and access for users at all technical levels.
It Promotes a Data-Driven Culture
Additionally, data-driven organizations can harness the power of crucial analytics to improve business processes, meet customer expectations, and go above and beyond competitors. With embedded BI, you can achieve data fluency without needing a data analyst to interpret information. You can make informed choices and drive your business in the right direction through comprehensive visualizations and analytics.
It Offers Constant Upgrades
Embedded BI also provides constant updates to reduce the time and resources necessary to access accurate data-driven reports. BI platforms let you add new features to your application's users for a constantly evolving product, without the maintenance burden that comes with in-house development.
It Bridges Analytics and Action
Embedded business intelligence has the power to bridge your information and your actions by offering different analytical capabilities. This solution empowers companies with the knowledge to understand complex information and make actionable decisions based on their findings. If threats or trends arise in your market, you can take appropriate action based on accurate data analytics.
It’s Made for All Architectures
The right embedded business intelligence tool is flexible, fitting all organizations’ architectures and databases for deployment on your platform, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and more.
It Saves You Time and Boosts Productivity
Embedded BI is a time-saving solution that helps you enhance your organizational productivity. For leaders, sales teams, product developers, and workers across the enterprise, embedded BI provides access to important insights without navigating complicated datasets. Data teams can save time and focus their energy on other crucial tasks without worrying about collecting, analyzing, and navigating complex information.
Embedded business intelligence saves you time while benefitting customers by providing access to valuable data about your organization and key insights about their patterns and previous interactions with your business. This prevents countless hours spent on manual reporting.
It Separates You in Your Market
You always want to stand out from competitors, and embedded BI is one of the best ways to differentiate your platform. It seamlessly integrates into your application to provide a unique feature users can take advantage of in no time. With white labeling capabilities, you can create a custom experience that aligns with your brand without relying on third party visual elements.
With all of those benefits, what impact will BI have on your business?
Embedded BI Impacts on Your Business
Embedded BI helps grow your business in many ways and significantly impacts companies by transforming how they use and visualize their data. It increases operational efficiency by directly integrating your workflows to streamline data-driven processes. This solution also impacts your user adoption rate, simplifying the user experience and improving customers’ impression of your business – making it an obvious choice for your company.
When you choose embedded business intelligence solutions, you make data more accessible to your teams and users. This accessibility is a massive advantage in a competitive market, especially with users looking for an easy-to-use source of all their information. Embedded BI solutions empower you to make actionable decisions to grow your business and make a difference.
More questions about embedded BI impact on businesses
What's the typical return on investment when implementing embedded BI into a SaaS product?
Implementing embedded analytics into a SaaS product typically delivers substantial ROI through multiple value streams that extend beyond simple cost calculations. The financial equation becomes compelling when you consider that building an embedded analytics solution internally often costs 3-5 times more than integrating a specialized tool. Development teams frequently underestimate the resources required for building sophisticated analytics capabilities, with many projects experiencing timeline extensions of 6-12 months beyond initial estimates. By leveraging established solutions like Toucan, you can avoid the difficult process of recreating complex functionality that specialized vendors have spent years perfecting.
- Revenue enhancement represents another critical ROI factor. Organizations implementing effective customer-facing analytics routinely report premium pricing potential compared to competitors without embedded data insights. This data monetization opportunity transforms analytics from a cost center to a revenue generator
- Customer retention metrics show equally impressive improvements. When users regularly rely on your embedded analytics to solve business problems, the switching costs increase substantially, creating powerful loyalty effects. This retention improvement alone can justify the investment, as increasing customer lifetime value directly impacts long-term profitability
Which metrics and KPIs should be prioritized for embedded analytics features?
Prioritizing the right metrics for embedded analytics features requires balancing technical capabilities with genuine business value.
- Start with metrics that directly relate to operational efficiency and financial outcomes. These might include order velocity, supply chain performance, resource utilization, conversion rates, or margin analysis—metrics that help users perform their jobs more effectively. The key is ensuring each visualization addresses specific questions within the natural context of the user's workflow, avoiding the common pitfall of creating impressive dashboards that users rarely consult.
- From a business perspective, prioritize metrics that demonstrate clear ROI to key stakeholders. For example, white-labeled analytics that showcase cost savings, revenue opportunities, or productivity improvements help your customers justify their investment in your platform.
The ultimate definition of successful metric prioritization is when users naturally incorporate analytics into their daily operations rather than treating data analysis as a separate activity. This seamless integration represents the highest form of embedded analytics success—where data-driven decision making becomes an intuitive part of the product experience rather than an additional feature.
Learn More About Embedded BI
Embedded business intelligence and analytics are crucial for modern organizations. Find out more essential information about embedded BI and data solutions from Toucan, including our flexible pricing options, support services, and how to request a demo or free trial. Our team is ready to help you understand how our complete embedded analytics solution can transform your software as a service offerings with minimal cost and implementation time.
