How to Properly use Data with the Help of Business Intelligence?
Many companies are not aware that they have a lot of knowledge in their company’s data. It is possible to deduce a lot of experience and possible results from adequately structured data. Still, it is crucial how to ask the right questions so that we can extract this information.
The art of asking questions
A fundamental challenge we face when we want to manage data is to identify good questions. The goal is to get the answers from the most crucial and valuable data for the company’s business processes. Let us take a concrete example of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system designed to manage a company’s resources. For instance, we can obtain data on financial flows from it, but we need additional software that summarizes this information and converts it into a report and data visualization.
Asking the right questions is a big challenge and a complex task. Thus, within the field of business intelligence, companies have begun to specialize in consulting to help their clients find critical information that they can obtain from their data. For example, consulting firms tell what questions a company should ask to get answers that will help them improve customer satisfaction, optimize the business process, improve logistics, cash flow, etc. But at this point, the process is usually completed, which is the first drawback, and the second is that the cost of consulting is extremely high, and many companies can not afford to opt for it.
More than just getting answers to questions
At easy.bi, we have taken quite a few steps forward to optimize our own companies within the Group and later our customers’ companies. We have found that we do not want and do not need only a system that organizes data and presents it in a more transparent form. Nevertheless, all further interpretation is left to a responsible person, who still has a lot of work to do in order to arrange them in a way that would give the company concrete answers and bring business benefits.
We decided that it is worth investing even more effort in creating such a powerful program that will be able to do all these further steps on its own and give us helpful INFORMATION, but concrete PROPOSALS based on the data.
When the computer provides a concrete SOLUTION …
I can illustrate the operation of our system well on the example of a store. Let’s say that this store works in such a way that the same customers come to it every month and that there are a few thousand of these customers. The store has existing information about them, namely, frequency of purchases, type of items, days of the visit, etc. A standard program would abstract this data and make graphs and analyzes, i.e. some averages and visualization from it, enabling an overview.
Can you imagine having a custom-made program for your company that gives you not only helpful information but concrete suggestions on what to do?
We approached the process differently, as we started from what the store is most interested in in terms of customers. The biggest challenge for the owner of such a store is that a regular customer stops returning at some point, thus replacing an existing store with someone else. When that happens, it’s too late, and it takes a lot of effort to get the customer back.
Therefore, we designed the system to identify how specific customers behave and look for certain deviations based on mathematical algorithms. Namely, we found that it is not essential to look at the middle but abnormal events.
Deviations in a positive direction mean that some customers are very satisfied and buy a lot. The store owner can offer them additional discounts and motivate them even more. In the case of negative deviations, however, it is possible to capture the moment before someone terminates the cooperation. So our system does not report information about 1000 customers to the owner, but the owner receives only one email every morning, and there is one line in it where it says: We suggest you call this customer today and ask him about satisfaction.
In this way, the store owner can thoughtfully invest his time in one target event and, with the system’s help, actively optimize where it pays off the most.
Have we piqued your interest?
We suggest you contact us for a meeting, and we can brainstorm on how we can help you optimize your business challenges.
