Have you ever wondered why a particular product of yours is struggling to gain sales in a particular area? Has one of your products seen a sudden and significant decline in customer purchases?
Finding the root cause to these and other business issues should be top priority; however, many businesses struggle to pinpoint the root of their problems without a significant investment in time and money. Many companies turn to extensive market studies to uncover the reasons why their products will not sell in a certain market and then invest in significant marketing and product redistribution campaigns to make up for their loss.
What they do not know, however, is that with the right data and the right approach, they can uncover the root cause of their current business challenges. Whether you are aware of it or not, your business is gathering an extensive amount of data and information every day. Rather than allowing it to sit there and accumulate, why not use it to solve current challenges, establish better outcomes, and improve decision-making for the future?
Using Business Intelligence to Break Through Your Business Data
Do you put any thought into the data your business gathers? Have you established parameters for data-gathering, or are you simply gathering everything you can in the hope that someday you will need it?
At its core, business intelligence is designed to make sure an organization’s data is an asset to the business. It ensures that you have the right data, at the right time and place, and displayed in the right visual format. When you use business intelligence to filter and manage your organization’s data, more data-drive decisions can be made and confident actions can be taken to pursue your desired business outcomes.
Here are a few ways you can begin using business intelligence today to help your organization become more outcome-oriented:
- Ask questions about the business issues/challenges you are experiencing. Too many companies start by asking questions about the data first, but if you really want to expose the root of the problem, you need to be asking questions about the issues. Once you have asked the right questions, you can begin to design an approach to identify the data that will help you arrive at the answers you need.
- Incorporate data. In order to truly gain a picture of what is going on in your organization, you need to be looking beyond the data in your ERP system. Gather data from a variety of sources within the business and externally including your CRM, POS, Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)or manufacturing systems if you have these. Use this type of data to search for important patterns or correlations.
- Embed analytics into your business intelligence solution. When analytics is embedded in business intelligence, your organization can be alerted to data patterns early on, providing enhanced context. This, in turn, makes your business intelligence more advanced and predictive in nature, allowing you to pinpoint problems before they become a substantial issue and more confidently pursue your business outcomes
