01 Mar
WITH POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY, AND WITH DATA COMES RELIABILITY
Around the globe, companies must cut costs and reduce risks as they face undemanding Sales, reluctant suppliers, and tighter credit. In addition, restrained credit can affect the entire supply chain, causing delays or limiting availability to key raw materials. It’s vital to have contingency plans for handling the potential impact of constrained trade. But with challenges come opportunities – opportunities from Business Intelligence. To justify BI, decision makers need to look at the big picture advantages.
BI compiles a company’s most essential data so employees can focus on answering crucial questions. Access to data allows for fast decision making and an edge over the competition. Let us address how BI can help you reduce costs, make smarter operational decisions, and help your business thrive within an uncertain economy.
IDENTIFYING COST-CUTTING OPPORTUNITIES AND INEFFICIENCIES
In good times, when revenue and margins are high, business leaders seldom ask if they can squeeze more out. Their perspectives change when the economy falters. This is when instances of poor decision-making comes to light.
Bottom line vs. top line: When professionals have access to the information they need, they’re able to focus on improving their work, rather than getting distracted by insignificant tasks. Taking a data-driven approach also opens up opportunities for new incentives by rewarding how employees improve the bottom line beyond expectations. In highly competitive positions such as sales, recognizing performance data this way lets top talent set goals for their maximum potential. BI thus helps empowering the employees and thus improves the bottom line.
It’s been shown that top-down change is only essential for companies during critical moments, while bottom-up change brings long-term improvements. With BI solutions, the company is guided by the bottom line keeping the top line in focus. As data is entered into the system, dashboards across different roles depend on the information needed while employees are connected by the same results. In some organizations, without centralized reporting, this leads to decisions made on false assumptions. Instead, through BI, everyone shares a single source of truth. Thus helping the change occur from the bottom up, rather than top down.
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
To win, survive, or grow in today’s market, businesses need discipline and execution. BI is capable of providing solid forecasting that takes into account the operational model and how it relates to the economic environment. It helps business units have fast, efficient and agile reactions when a problem occurs.
Turn on a dime: Disruption is often unpredictable. When a market shifts and a business comes across a road block, BI makes it easy to sail in a new direction. Data is selected and displayed based on the organization’s strengths, highlighting opportunities for additional revenue. With BI’s far-reaching effects, everyone within the organization can be prepared to make an impact where it’s needed. BI thus helps business units react faster and efficiently when challenges arise.
Find profitable customers/channels: Data improves conversations by focusing on facts rather than subjective experiences. It’s imperative to have data that supports every argument. If decision makers are discussing something that may deeply affect the company, the outcome shouldn’t depend on subjective experience or a single event. Instead, to make important decisions, there must be data available that keeps everyone focused on the reality of the business, not just the perspective of executives. BI helps you analyze customer profitability, so you can allocate your limited resources on those customers that are profitable now and cultivate those customers who are most likely to grow your sales when the economy recovers.
Get real-time information to the right employees: With access to information, your company stake holders can quickly analyze what’s happening within the business today and make decisions based on information that’s both current and relevant. With a nuanced and reliable BI reporting tool, stakeholders can rest easy knowing the business is planning for long-term success. The most common problem in several companies is that people on the frontline do not receive information, even though they make the most decisions. And yet individuals who make the fewest decisions, albeit the strategic ones, have the most access to information. With BI, stakeholders can have direct access to the data that’s driving the company’s decisions to easily get on board with them.
INCREASED VISIBILITY
Identify new revenue opportunities: By being able to analyze all your data, you will obtain insights about potential opportunities you might have missed in the past. You can create new offers to adjust to the current market situation and to better satisfy your customers.
Track KPIs: You will be getting alerts and notifications every time data changes regarding a specific KPI. If the data changes, you get notified and can drill down to see why it happened and what can you do to fix it.
Get a 360° view of your customers: You will understand customer behavior better and use it to provide the customer with customized offers. Knowing what customers buy or don’t, at what time and where, enables you to turn this information into profit.
The bottom line is, Business Intelligence solutions combine the best value, pervasive deployment, and complete integration. To reap the full performance enhancing benefits of BI, you need a solution that is easy to use and makes your stakeholders smarter. Business Intelligence doesn’t need to be so complex that it shuts out regular business users. Nor does it need to eat up IT resources. The key is to find the right BI implementation partner to help you thrive.