Implementation of Business Intelligence in Financial Decision-Making: A Pre-Experimental Study in a Service-Sector SME

Abstract

The study aimed to evaluate observed changes in financial information for decision-making following the implementation of Business Intelligence (Power BI) in an SME in the service sector. A quantitative, explanatory approach was adopted using a pre-experimental, one-group pretest–posttest design. The dependent variable was operationalized across four dimensions: time, information management, satisfaction, and quality. To test the hypothesis, paired-sample tests (Student’s t test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test) were applied to ensure the robustness of results against potential deviations from the normality assumption (α = 0.05). The findings showed statistically significant differences between pre- and post-measurements (p = 0.018), corroborated by the Wilcoxon test (p = 0.0039). The effect size was large (Cohen’s d ≈ 0.99; Hedges’ g ≈ 0.94). A sensitivity analysis incorporating ±10% variations in indicator weights confirmed the stability of the results. The hypothesis was supported: the implementation of BI yielded improvements that are both statistically significant and of practical relevance for the firm’s financial management.