The Application of dashboards in the Management of Commercial Proposals to Public tenders : Application to SMEs in the Civil Construction Sector

Business Intelligence (BI) is increasingly important for the optimization and management of resources, becoming essential for the performance of companies. However, the largest companies are the ones that have been more dedicated to the implementation of BI in their companies. Given that in Portugal the business mass consists of 99.9% of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), so it is necessary to understand how they may adapt to this new reality. This study aims to verify the impact and practicality of BI applications in the most common processes and activities of SMEs. The practical case of a Portuguese company will be studied, where the intention is to implement a new BI tool that will allow the budgeting of its commercial proposals to be fully adjusted to the market and its target customers, thus obtaining a competitive advantage concerning your competitors. This research work aims to contribute to SMEs, in distinct business areas, but, in particular, for the construction companies, to demonstrate that, by using company data and open data, is possible to use data visualization to a data-driven decision with the most updated data.