Business Intelligence: Todays Ladder to Leadership

Business Intelligence act as a ladder for corporate leader to shape the future of business. It enables the business to make intelligent, fact based decision.

In the era of BIG DATA, where there is continued pressure on business to find true business insight, enhance decision making and improve operational efficiencies. Business Intelligence comes in with greater advantage over traditional reporting.

Instead of being reactive, BI enables the business to be proactive with more focused on growing the business. BI tool is empowering organisations to bring together and analyse data on a large scale which never previously possible.

BI has emerged as a flexible interface to enable more people to make better decision based on more data, with advanced and interactive pull model technology it makes user to work at the speed of thought.

With low IT Impact it can easily connect all Idle dots in business and collectively form a “supply chain “and allows business to use past behaviour and predict future activity. This will not only put you ahead of competitor, it will help you stay lively during uncertain time.

How Business Intelligence can make your business more Intelligent.

 1)     Get faster answer to your business question: - In the era of multi-national company where sun never sets for business, Business intelligence gives you real time insights of your business, rather than spending hours reading through volume of printed reports.

2)     Eliminate Guesswork: -  Business intelligence can provide more accurate historical data, real-time updates, analysis between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive “what if analysis," eliminating the need to guesstimate.

3)     Get Actionable KPI: - Get accurate and real time KPI to know better your business and take appropriate and timely action.

4)     See Past, Present and future of your business: - Business Intelligence can predict the future of business by showing yours past and present report of business.

5)     Manage Inventory better: - Business intelligence can help you "order the right amount of inventory at the right time so that customers receive their products when they need them," and your business doesn't bear the cost of stocking excess inventory.

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Following practice can make BI Implementation success in your business environment.

• Use intelligence of business intelligence.
•  Entire process should be agile and pull based.
• Choose the most appropriate tool based on use and capability.
• Seek training and help from practitioner on regular basis.
• Make sure there is involvement of everyone, who are in system.

         

Applying these best practices can help deliver BI capabilities to make business more data driven.

Transforming Manpower Capital : Workforce Analytics

The requirement for workforce analytics is in high demand as business innovators recognize that the right talent is a foundational necessity to acculturate new, more effective business strategies.  It is equally important to access and analyze the appropriate insights to support talent related business decisions.

Clients are more eager to know their workforce’s analytical capabilities to support their business’ potential.  HR Departments can use workforce analytic insights to deliver the right workforce at the right time to meet business needs that help realize full, competitive potential.

Workforce analytics can find hidden value in an organization’s workforce and can transform this captive, intangible intellectual capital into a tangible balance sheet asset!

Workforce analytics is a multi-step undertaking that requires modular improvement keeping people, technology and processes synchronized in moving from their current state to future optimum levels.

                                               ”Phases of workforce analytics"

* Raw data and Reports.
* Benchmarking and Dashboards.
* Workforce surveys and considering use of external parameters.  (This involves complementing appropriate business & technical models and advanced analytics).
* Workforce potential forecasting and planning.
* Predictive analytics and better evaluation of potential business outcomes in reaction to competitive environments.


Note: The detailed methodology is not discussed due to privacy policy.


Workforce analytics is a process for long term success, placing the "right people at right time in the right job ".

3 Ways Business Intelligence Can Improve Your Sales and Marketing Efforts

With today’s business intelligence dashboards, end users in every department of the organization have a more effective means of gaining greater insight into their side of the business without having to go back to IT or business analysts for more data. And that data in the hands of your sales and marketing team in particular can mean huge improvements for those departments.

Here are three ways business intelligence software can help improve your sales and marketing efforts.

Identify and focus on higher-profit customers.

Your best customer might not actually be the one who places the biggest order (although every sales team loves to land a “big fish”), but rather those dependable, repeat customers who consistently place good sized orders. With business intelligence software, you can rank your customers based on the recency, frequency, and value of their purchases to determine exactly who the best customers are. And once you build an accurate profile of those most-profitable customers, you can better focus your marketing efforts to target similar prospects.

It makes sense to seek prospective customers that have similar attributes and to focus your customer acquisition efforts on adding them to the fold.  With a little imagination and good business intelligence software in place, you can begin by implementing simple measures to enable you to rank your current customers according to their relative value to your organization. Initially, try ranking them by profit contribution alone, then you can add more sophisticated factors later, if you choose (timely payment, returns, complaints, etc.).

Once you’ve arranged customers from high to low value, you can do two powerful things right off the bat. First, you can better target your customer-acquisition initiatives by focusing your customer-acquisition efforts around the attributes common to high-value customers. Second, you can begin to engineer your overall customer mix by targeting high-value replacements for low-value customers.

Increase the accuracy of sales forecasts.

Information concerning future revenue answers the questions of ”what” you’re going to sell, “to whom” you’re going to sell it, and “when” you will make the sale. When it’s accurate and timely, this information has immense business value.  Industry studies have found that an improvement in forecast accuracy produces significant downstream improvements such as perfected order fill rates, reduced inventory levels, and higher profit margins.

By leveraging the insights provided by business intelligence software, marketing and sales teams can improve the accuracy of their forecasts by accommodating for seasonal demand, product promotions, slow-moving items, causal variables, outliers and much more. The forecasting burden can be considerably eased and the reliability of the forecast much improved when the right information is at hand to support the underlying analysis. BI tools give decision makers ready access to information that provides a detailed portrait of sales history. Easy and direct access to historical sales information supports both forecast accuracy and better, faster procurement and inventory decisions.

Measure the effect of your marketing programs.

BI software can also help you easily plan, monitor and assess the success of your promotional activities to see what marketing campaigns/promotions your customer base is reacting the best too. That way, marketing budgets can be shuffled and allocated to the more successful campaigns that produce the best possible ROI. For instance, if Promotion A generated $1000 in sales but cost the company $250, that program is not actually more cost-effective than Promotion B that generated $700 in sales but only cost $100 to run. By leveraging information from your BI system, you can maximize the revenue returned from each advertising dollar spent. By comparing actual to expected results by campaign, you can “market” smarter and better identify opportunities to increase sales and growth.

According to me , effective use of business intelligence by the sales and marketing team can lead to improved customer retention rates, higher revenues from up-sell/cross-sell campaigns, and enhanced levels of customer satisfaction. And at the end of the day happy customers mean more revenue for your company.