When a BI proposal arrives, most people turn to the dashboard list. How many reports, how many pages, how many charts. It feels like the thing you are buying.
It is the smallest part of the work. Dashboards are the last step of a long chain. The effort sits in the chain.
Where the hours actually go
Before a single chart exists, someone has to connect every source system, map codes that do not match, decide which number is the right one, and make the whole thing refresh without a person pressing a button. An old ERP without an API, a plant that keeps stock in a spreadsheet, a region that names products its own way: each one adds days. None of them shows up in a dashboard count.
So two quotes with the same report list can be far apart, and both can be honest. One bidder looked at your data. The other did not.
Five questions to ask every bidder
- Which of our source systems did you assume, and how will you connect each one?
- What data clean-up is in scope, and what do you expect our team to fix?
- How often will each metric refresh?
- Which costs are licences, and which are services?
- What does support cost after go-live, and what does it cover?
If a bidder cannot answer the first question, the price is a guess.
Make the bidders compete on the same scope
Send every bidder the same list: the decisions you want to support, the metrics behind them, every source, refresh needs and who sees what. Then compare. You will learn more from how each bidder handles your messiest source than from any sample dashboard.
What good looks like
Good BI removes manual work. For a global food and beverage company, we built unified reporting and an executive command centre, with a 60% reduction in manual reporting effort. The reports were not the hard part. Joining the data behind them was.
The full guide covers licence pricing from official vendor pages, cost drivers, project phases, hidden costs and an RFP checklist for mid-size companies in India.
Read the full guide: BI Consulting Cost in India: A Mid-Size Buyer's Guide
Abhijit Singh is CEO of Seven Billion Analytics, a Snowflake and Salesforce partner that builds enterprise AI, analytics and ERP systems.
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