Bi report development

I'm good at tsql and have nailed the report writing environments, BUT am failing at bi reporting. I don't understand what the reports do for the business. I don't know what "consolidating sales with the ledger" means for example. My very limited successes came through random pattern matching within code, or converting a working spreadsheet to a report.Help

business intelligence is an umbrella term used for using different type of tools to get insight into your body of data for your business. with business intelligence you take all that pile of data and see if you can see trends, forecast things etc
For example I work in a manufacturing environment. our company outsources the production of our devices to an outside manufacturing company. that manufacturing company gets the parts for our products from all over the world.
We get detailed information about each of our devices from this manufacturer granular enough for us to know which component on our devices' mother board was made where when etc. lets says at one point we suddenly are getting a bunch of defects on our devices. Now since we have all of the data from manufacturing floor we can start to dig in the data they provided to maybe find root cause by doing some analysis. We find which serial numbers are failing then we look at the manufacturing data and interestingly we find out, the problem started right on 2017. Then we examine which component is failing and we find that capacitor x used to be purchased from country Y but a new generation capacitor was being used starting 2017. Now we can go back to manufacturing and tell them something changed with this capacitor and it is causing issues, fix it.
then the fixing process begins and we also keep track of all the PO numbers or Return material data in our database. from this we can also gain some insight , for example how many of the problematic devices have they fixed, how many are left to fix, how fast are they fixing it, how long does it take them to fix it etc. so these types of data can help give you insight that you might not be able to get just by looking at raw data. there are all kind of fancy tools out there you can use or create your own using PowerBI, SSRS etc.

I would encourage you to checkout youtube for free courses on business intelligence. What I have described here is just a small sample of this huge tech stack. very powerful though!

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Thanks, I guess. It's not technical skills I'm lacking really. It's the gap between the database and the ERP user. Who's motivations behind requesting a bi report are a mystery to me.

So what is it exactly that you are looking for Richard, we are here to help each other. You sound frustrated