“Leveraging big data analytics is no longer considered a novel approach to decision-making, but an important strategy for organizations looking to raise their competitiveness.”
-Information and Communications Technology Council
In today's fast-paced world, analytics present exciting opportunities by using data you already have to give you information about your markets, customers, and operations you didn't already know. Benefits of Analytics
The benefits of analytics can be narrow to solve specific issues or broad and far reaching. Analytics can help the team remove decision making blind spots and resolve problems proactively instead of reactively. It can also find key levers that would not be obvious without deep pattern recognition to drive bottom line improvements, and saves time via automation. Most importantly, analytics help you ask more questions and discover patterns that can’t be recognized using surface numbers.
As stated by a board member of a family-run business who had established their firm’s analytics strategy with an external partner, “Our analytics partner has helped the management and operations team uncover new insights and provide in depth data and analysis that we wouldn’t have otherwise considered when making critical decisions. Furthermore, we custom built a revenue analytics engine that ultimately increased our revenue by 5-10%. The project and investment paid itself back within months and has continued to contribute to the company’s overall efficiency and effectiveness. I’m happy to say we’ll continue to invest into this field going forward.
Know you need analytics but don't know where to start?
Here are three easy, yet crucial steps to get your organization started along the data analytics journey.
1. AUTOMATED REPORTING Having the right information in your hand is more important than ever, making having a good data collection and reporting strategy crucial.
Imagine a beautiful screen full of useful, up-to-date and interactive data visualization and information - all of the insights you want on a specific topic (such as revenue, cost, customers, product lines) in one comprehensive, yet clean, dashboard. This visualization provides insights that are impactful, interactive, and easy to understand so you can get up to speed while sipping on your morning coffee.
To start, it is important to determine what data you need in order to get the crucial insights to build a thorough report. From there, you can determine what data you are currently collecting, and build a strategy to begin collecting the data you are missing.
2. WORKSHOPS
No matter how much you work on your analytics strategy or how many reports you create – the analytics you do are only effective if they are properly used by your employees. Time and time again we have seen organizations spend large sums of money on an analytics project only to see it underused by their employees.
That is why workshops and lunch and learns are absolutely essential if you want your organization to achieve analytics excellence. Set aside an hour a week and give your employees the tools they need to excel.
If you need help getting started, we have vast experience running corporate workshops for organizations of all sizes and knowledge levels.
3. Revenue enhancement Revenue and sales are the engine of any business. It is important to begin understanding and using analytics tools such as machine learning in order to predict sales, consumer types, churn rates and much more. It may sound complicated, but machine learning is a simple prediction tool that can be applied to almost any data and information set. Even data from your social media could be a treasure chest full of valuable information!
This one may sound daunting, but if you are unable to do this in-house you can get started with organizations like us for a low cost to set you down the right path.
Conclusion
The use of data analytics is no longer a good to have, but rather a must have for organizations of all sizes. If you are interested in learning more about how to leverage data and analytics for your organization, book a free consultation and speak with one of our experts today!
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