How to Lower TCO and Increase ROI with Embedded Analytics

The value proposition of embedded analytics in 2024 has never been clearer: real-time insights that help your user base make smarter decisions, while enhancing their engagement with both data analytics as a tool, and your product or business systems.

But what about the costs?

With the ability to perform data analysis directly integrated within your core workflows, embedded analytics solutions can help you better identify inefficiencies, streamline operations, and reduce manual reporting costs, directly lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO). Highly customizable dashboards, more accessible reporting, and powerful AI analytics features also can lead to improved user satisfaction, higher prospect retention rates, and an overall boost to your return-on-investment (ROI), making it a cost-effective and cost-friendly solution for your modernization initiatives.

As an ISV or enterprise, the prospect of embedding analytics into your product or business workflows to lower TCO and increase ROI is promising, but knowing exactly how it achieves this can understandably be elusive. In this blog, we explore practices you can follow to cut costs and drive profitability, transforming your product/systems into a competitive advantage.

What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of embedded analytics?

In the context of embedded analytics, the total cost of ownership (TCO) includes all direct and indirect costs associated with integrating and maintaining analytics capabilities into your business systems (enterprise) or software product (ISV). This encompasses the costs of software licensing, hardware, integration, training, and ongoing support. 

The reason why lowering TCO is so important for many companies is that it is crucial for staying competitive in the market by reducing expenses, while increasing ROI ensures every dollar spent on analytics brings substantial value back to your business.

Embedded analytics tools, by their nature, allow for significant streamlining of data processes and automating of reporting, which enables you to further cut down on labor costs, optimize resource allocation, and turn your data into a powerful tool for growth.

Ultimately, understanding all of the following benefits of embedded BI, and how they can lower your TCO when applied properly, will empower your business to make better informed decisions, and maximize the impact of your software investments.

Recommended reading: The Ultimate Guide to Embedded Analytics - Free Guide

3 ways embedded analytics lowers TCO

1. It streamlines data management processes

Implementing embedded analytics allows you to automate and optimize data management processes which are typically manual in nature, reducing costs overall. 

Traditional data handling methods often involve manual data extraction, transformation, and reporting, which can be time-consuming and costly. The same goes for report creation and insight analysis. For example, for many enterprise organizations, their business departments may rely heavily on in-house data analysts to prepare reports and provide data insights for the rest of the organization, often leading to backlogs and leaving analysts unable to focus on other key activities. Embedded BI reduces such costs.

How? Embedded analytics tools, such as those offered by Yellowfin BI, integrate directly into your software, significantly improving access to dashboards and reports to people in your organization and reducing their need to rely on analysts or management to provide them with report creation and insights. Yellowfin's robust data integration capabilities allow you to consolidate data from various sources into a single, cohesive platform. This eliminates the need for your users to have to access a separate application to view crucial data and act on reports (making data more core to their daily workflows) and redundant data management tasks, while reducing errors, and lowering labor costs. Automating routine processes also frees up valuable resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Moreover, Yellowfin’s embedded analytics suite provides advanced data preparation and transformation tools that further simplify data management and not only reduces TCO, but also ensures faster access to accurate insights, enhancing their decision-making. 

Overall, reducing the time and effort required for data management and report  creation/access with embedded analytics allows you to allocate resources toward these operations more efficiently, saving costs and increasing efficiency. These benefits directly contribute to a higher ROI by enabling quicker, informed decision-making.

Further reading: 5 benefits of modernizing your application with embedded analytics

2. It enhances user engagement and satisfaction

Embedded analytics provide users with intuitive, interactive dashboards and real-time reporting capabilities directly within your application, significantly enhancing the user experience. Tools like Yellowfin BI’s embedded analytics suite offer highly customizable and visually appealing action-based dashboards that deliver personalized insights. These dashboards make data-driven decision-making more accessible and engaging for users at all levels, leading to increased satisfaction and engagement.

Yellowfin’s embedded analytics also feature user-friendly interfaces and self-service analytics capabilities, empowering users to explore data and generate reports without relying on IT support. This autonomy increases user engagement and encourages a data-driven culture within your organization. Higher user satisfaction translates to better customer retention rates and reduced churn, which in turn boosts ROI. Additionally, satisfied users are more likely to leverage advanced analytics features, leading to greater adoption and value realization from your software investment, rather than risking it being underutilized or under-valued.

Yellowfin’s unique collaborative features, such as the ability to share insights and comment on reports, and enhance it further with contextual narrative presentation via Yellowfin Stories and Present, improving user engagement by fostering a collaborative environment. These features make it easier for teams to discuss findings and make collective decisions based on their data. 

Related reading: What is data storytelling? The value of context & narrative in BI

3. It allows you to leverage automated, AI analytics for advanced insights

Today’s best embedded analytics solutions often include advanced features like automated analytics, which enable proactive decision-making. By automatically analyzing historical data and identifying patterns or interesting statistical deviations, automated analytics can forecast future trends and outcomes without the need for your users to perform manual monitoring or analysis.

This capability allows, for example, an enterprise business to anticipate market changes, optimize operations, and mitigate risks before they impact your bottom line, while an ISV product team can monitor the usage behavior of product users to identify engagement opportunities. For both parties, automated analytics can also be leveraged to reduce downtime and maintenance costs by addressing issues it identifies before they escalate. Being able to make more proactive decisions ultimately means you can improve operational efficiency and reduce unforeseen expenses, effectively lowering TCO. The strategic insights gained from automated analytics also drive innovation and business growth, contributing to a higher ROI.

Cutting-edge AI analytics features, like those offered by Yellowfin BI's embedded analytics suite, can also empower your users with advanced capabilities such as natural language-powered analysis that allows them to interact with data using simple, conversational queries (such as with Yellowfin’s Guided NLQ feature), making complex data accessible to business-level personnel without deep technical expertise. This democratization of data empowers more users to leverage analytics for decision-making, thereby increasing the overall value derived from your analytics investments. This capability is particularly valuable for business-level users who need clear, actionable insights to make strategic decisions. 

By leveraging these advanced AI capabilities, both enterprise and ISV can gain deeper insights, predict future trends, and make proactive decisions, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs. This not only lowers TCO, but also maximizes ROI by further turning your data into a strategic asset for business growth.