Business Intelligence: Luxury or Necessity?
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Rita Mae Brown originally wrote these words in her novel, “Sudden Death” in the year 1983 and yes, this quote has been misattributed to Albert Einstein for years now but that’s not my point.
Businesses today have been proving the definition of insanity in the same way over and over again by allowing their business to stagnate and fall into an endless loop of conservative processes and never trying something new. You want your business to evolve into the potential you envisioned it to be, but growth is virtually non-existent when a company never looks to optimize the way they serve their clients or customers.
To know is to measure and to measure is to know. Do you have a lot of data accumulating regularly, stored away on the cloud for one day your dreaded audit is due? This (BIG) data doesn’t have to drift in a stagnant pool. It’s a valuable asset to your company and the key to unlocking exponential growth for the future of your company. Many successful leaders today have one thing in common. They journal daily and reflect on what they can do better tomorrow. Companies “journal” each day, accumulating data from every aspect and yet they fail to read and dissect that “journal” of data to ensure yesterday’s mistakes and inefficiencies would become tomorrow’s victories and proficiencies.
First of all, what is “Business Intelligence” as they call it today? Business intelligence leads to better business decisions by accessing a large volume of data or “BIG” data. Even if your company doesn’t accumulate a large amount of data, one can still produce considerable benefits from deriving insights from your stockpile of data. Business Intelligence or “BI” for short, is not a single piece of software to analyze big data. It is an umbrella term that includes best business practices, software, infrastructure, and any other tools to optimize decision making and enhance performance.
So what am I trying to tell you? BI is about information analysis, pulling together information from the different facets of your business and converting that raw data into valuable reports, charts, and other analytical tools such as scenario analysis and forecasting to provide insight into the questions of What If. Most businesses never get to the part of asking the question of What If, because they are stuck asking the question of What “now”?
Your company needs to convert raw data into information to carve out the winning strategies for the future of your business. Is all your data stored in massive spreadsheets or servers? All that data should provide your company with information on sales trends, consumer behaviour and resources allocation. The converted data can show you and your business partners the validity of each of your products and help in maximizing revenues and reduce costs.
You can eliminate the tedious task of consolidating data manually, allowing managers to monitor businesses in every step of the way and reducing the scope of error by providing accurate information to make better decisions on what is happening now and to forecast for the future.
If the above hasn’t convinced you already that your business needs BI, here are some key reasons why BI can mean the success of your business:
· Easier decision making.
· It provides a structured way for growing your revenue.
· Increase the competitive advantage over other players in the industry.
· Improve the efficiency of your business operations.
· Enhance the quality of your customer service.
The reasons above should not be a luxury. It should be a necessity to have these key factors present to pave the way to the success and prosperity of your business. Don’t find yourself stuck trying to make sense of your business on spreadsheets and taking on the tedious task of putting it together in a way that’s easy to understand for the rest of your colleagues.
Going only the spreadsheet route produces results that are not always accurate or insightful. While Excel has many excellent features, it’s like driving the 20 km/h with a Lamborghini Aventador, only to see your competitor drive by in the fast lane with their Bugatti Veyron. For a bigger future, like taking a company to the next level, you need bigger, better, faster, and more efficient tools.
Why DRIVATIC?
So that’s the what and the why to Business Intelligence, but why partner with a company such as DRIVATIC? We know your data analysis and insights are a great asset to your company, but it can also be a great asset to your competitor. So, having your information falling into the wrong hands is the last thing we’d like to see happen to any of our clients.
That’s why we developed a platform to give secure accesses of specific reports to individual employees within your company. Easily request new login access to our development team without any extra cost to new users added. We have dedicated support to offer at your, and we are here to provide you with an everchanging and evolving BI tool that will change as your business does to fit you with the perfect tailor-made solution that delivers the best results and to level up your business.
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From Paper trail to Digital Footprints
business
From Paper trail to Digital Footprints
We always considered our business to take on the sole purpose of data analysis, assuming all our future clients would have bridged the gap from pen to paper to spending endless hours on capturing data into excel spreadsheets. We were mistaken. Many big companies today still have links in the chain of their business process that involve capturing information onto paper and making someone responsible to read in all that data into a usable spreadsheet. This can be a tedious process for anyone and not to mention the mistakes one can make trying to understand the hieroglyphs some of your employees can manage to scribble down. Human error in capturing data can lead to unclean volumes of data and complicated conversions into a valuable solution for business intelligence.
Here at DRIVATIC, we created a simple new solution to bridge the gap of hard labour data capturing.
We call it DRIVATIC Paper. We take your original form of capturing data and replicate it onto a digital way accessible anywhere on any digital format. We design the structure to require the minimum amount of labour to complete. With easy tools like drop down option, radio buttons and compulsory fields, one can ensure cleaner data to produce a more effective data model for your BI solution.
We’ve also added tools to capture photos into any data entry. Take a photo on your smartphone or tablet and add it to the form entry as you would add an attachment to an e-mail.
Does your data entry require a signature of a particular employee or recipient of an item you delivered? This is also a secure element to add to any form we create for you. Also, all data entries are linked to a GPS coordinate system that will log the geological location of each entry.
What if you find yourself without any reception? No problem, the system would still capture any data entries you make outside of areas of reception and store it to upload later as soon as you move into a vicinity with a signal to a reception tower.
The best part of it all- data is stored on our SQL databases can be exported at any time onto a usable excel format should you request to do so. We can also develop a great BI solution with the data that is stored, allowing you to view entries on a real-time basis on your dynamic dashboard as they come rolling in.
Be sure to contact one of our sales consultants to find out more about how this solution can transform your business and help take it to the next level.
Take your business from paper to digital.
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Do you know your customers?
– Customer Analysis and Analytics for your Business
Knowing your ideal customer is to see the demand – the need to which you are the supply. Strangely enough, many parallels can be drawn between a successful life of dating or marriage, and you guessed it – business. Before any person can meet a loving partner for life, they have to tackle the hard task of getting to know themselves better. To know yourself better is to understand what you can offer – what you can supply to a possible future wife or husband. Knowing this leads to the next part:
Getting to know the type of partner that would find your supply valuable. Not everything you like will fit the bill of what you can supply to if you’re getting this analogy.
The same goes for your business. You’ve envisioned what your company will work to become and you know what you can offer, but what customer out there has to benefit from what you’d have to provide them?
Any successful boxer will tell you that swinging anywhere will bring you nowhere. So as a business finding your ideal target group or market will bring you one step closer to narrowing down your marketing strategy. Knowing which customers can benefit from your offering leads to our next step.
Narrowing your market down with previous data.
Jumping back to our initial analogy of relationships, both parties in any successful marriage would know the needs of their partner and how to satisfy each of those needs. Whether it’s your love language to require touch, an act of service or words of affirmation, these needs need to be addressed and cared for otherwise you’ll be headed for rocky waters. Again, the same goes for your customer. Each of your customers has different behavioural patterns or trends when it comes to declaring their needs and satisfying them. Customers don’t complain about their mouths. They protest with their feet. They just don’t come back. Knowing when you are not addressing the right need at the right time could unequivocally decrease your clientele.
Predicting where and when specific needs will arise will help you better your stock intake, having the gun ready to fire at the right time. You wouldn’t like to have any unnecessary stock clouding your warehouse or store. Overstocking can mean that your business is trying to meet the needs of customers that don’t fit your target market, keeping more around just for the off chance that one of them will buy into what you have to offer as an extra. You may miss out on your customers’ needs and what they like in general — leading in damaging your business, making you overspend on a stock that will eventually have to be discounted to get off your shelves — wasting money and time.
According to Forbes, 81% of businesses today rely on some form of customer analysis and analytics. Are you part of the 19% that doesn’t know the value of knowing your customers?
Will you be creating the right honey to draw your ideal customer out of a buzzing market and assure a better leads generation to fuel your business?
Having an unhealthy clientele that contains customers that don’t benefit from your offering could lead to your business changing into what it is not. Attract the right client that will accept what you have to offer and which benefit from it time in and time out.
As you’d think, no loving partner would like to change to fit another partner. In the end, you’ll turn back to what you do best and fail to satisfy a need that doesn’t provide your offering, causing you to lose valuable time and energy.
DRIVATIC specializes in creating the ultimate get-to-know dates with your customers, helping you to analyze the behaviour of your clientele base and designing a great analytics solution to better the understanding of your stock intake to save you time and money in offering the right products for the right customers at the right time. AVDW.
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Knowing the Answers to the What Ifs of your Business – Advanced Scenario Analysis and Forecasting
All right, so now you’ve looked at your business retrospectively. With the help of your fully customized and tailor-made dashboard from DRIVATIC, you could gain a great perspective of the history of your business and what the current status of every nook and cranny is when it comes to your current affairs, but what about the future of your business.
You’ve played around with the filters and slicers, seeing your data change before your eyes, but that’s still producing calculations on KPIs according to historical data.
As a successful business owner, you can’t afford a real-life trial and error process in your business. Not only will it cost you money, but the precious time you could’ve utilized better to produce real growth in your industry.
So why not do this on a DRIVATIC dashboard report?
Ask yourself, how would your important data change should your favourite set of KPIs increase or decrease with a percentage or two or what would my bottom-line look like should I have increased the amount of produce on a particular offering. This helps a business owner learn from his company’s past to create a clear view of all the wrong decisions the company made and to improve on them in the future.
People often say: “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” but no, scenario analysis is not some form of wishful thinking. It’s creating a set of possible outcomes to future events based on historical data and being prepared to face all the challenges your business can face will set you in a good position. It will help you create the most effective contingency plans for various of your projects should any worst case scenario arise because let’s face it – a business faces a lot of uncontrollable and you have to plan your way through every permutation and combination of these factors when they fall to the dark side of things.
However, what about the future?
With DRIVATIC’s BI solution, you’ve managed to see your company’s historical data in a fantastic way (Dynamic Reporting) and where improvements you should make.
How do you paint a picture of the future with the newly suggest KPIs you’ve viewed will improve your business?
The answer:
Forecasting. With our highly skilled team of developers, we can create statistical models such as multivariate regression models to paint a picture and find the exact KPIs needed to optimize your strategy and increase the revenue of your business with no time to spare.
Scenario Analysis and Forecasting for your business is a necessity. There’s no use in journaling your thoughts and experiences if you don’t reflect on the past and consider where to improve. The data your business accumulates is a valuable asset that can unlock the secrets to gaining an advantage over your competitors and improve solely on your terms.
Ask one of our sales consultants for more information on how you can have your ultimate BI solution designed to fit the needs unique to your industry and business.
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From Numbers to Pictures: Why Visualizing Data is key to the success of your business
From
Numbers to
Pictures
Why Visualizing Data is key to the success of your business.
So you’ve probably noticed since your days playing “kaalvoet”-rugby that data rarely stays in the raw format of columns and digits. There is always some exciting way to visualise data and to quote Willbert Kinnear, “Frustration is only a matter of Perspective”. So if you’re frustrated at looking at boring Excel spreadsheet, always remember that the digits you are staring at might as well be the next Picasso that will tell you something you didn’t know about your business.
"Frustration is only a matter of Perspective"
So, except for the luring attraction of seeing your data in such a beautiful format, what other possible reasons could there be to convert data into mind-bending flows of art? Well, to your brain, this is a feat far easier to accomplish. Pictures are perceived better by your brain in comparison to text. The generation of young millennial business executives prefers a picture-format to understand the state of their business. Instagram realised the power of images far earlier and pertained their strategy to the maximum visuals and the minimum amount of text. This is because our brains can get far more information in a tenth of a second from a visual versus only seeing a matrix of numbers flowing down a spreadsheet.
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Visuals are also committed to your long-term memory. Remembering information is key to making decisions ahead and having a brief time to understand the current state of affairs would require something that will stick to your memory for the time forward. Visuals also tell stories. When it comes to painting a better picture in the minds of those you are trying to get your point across, making it easier for them to relate to on a deeper human level will be a specific catalyst in communicating your ideas and arguments to co-workers and prospective clients.
Visuals will always reveal patterns, trends, changes and correlations far more efficiently over time than trying to spot it in a raw spreadsheet. Visuals also have a great way of simplifying complex data into something more comprehensible. When it comes to data, there are often many factors that help to paint a picture and trying to consider all those factors at one glance without a helpful visual can be quite tedious. Lastly, it is proved that visuals also create a better chance of convincing others of your argument than the use of words only. In a 3M-sponsored study at the University of Minnesota School of Management found that presenters who use visual aids are 43% more effective in persuading audience members than those who didn’t use visual aids.
Are you harnessing the full potential of your business’ data by using compelling visuals to communicate ideas, results and arguments to others? Drivatic can be of great aid to build you the ultimate visuals tool in the form of a dynamic dashboard that will not only paint the best picture possible of your business but make it all come to life when drilling down to the answers you seek.
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