Here is one recent example of how a business intelligence tool can deliver more than just new operational insights.
The client: Multiple systems, multiple sites, time and labour-intensive manual reporting
The result: Timely, automated reports, new insights with an instant feedback portal
Next Steps: Deployed to mobile with chat, user accountability and predictive analytics
Managing a business is very much about the people that you work with. The clients that rely on our services to run their business and the employees at Advance that are responsible for delivering these business systems. Clients and employees both need to have a good level of customer satisfaction or relationships can fall apart.
It was interesting to hear from my peers about situations where talented employees have left their jobs because of frustrations caused by data overload and using a process that is inefficient, manual, slow and often frustrating. There are times when work will be challenging and that is a part of life, but throwing more labour into a manual process to get the result is not a good long-term solution.
Companies that foster employee growth through technology innovation will improve staff retention. We try to adopt innovative tools early that are good value and this means our team is always learning new skills. The users of these solutions on the client side are eager to adopt a new system if it makes their work life easier and more productive.
Employee satisfaction and retention was an unexpected benefit from deploying a successful business intelligence platform.
Below is a BI solution we have been working on which is quite a common example where daily reporting is needed and there simply aren’t enough hours in a day to manually pull all of the data from the various branches and the 30+ systems. This type of reporting will cause frustration to any employee, especially if they are tasked with manually accessing each branch early every morning to build a complete view of the businesses performance.
The Challenge
Multiple disparate business systems across different locations, systems like Xero, MYOB, SAP, many others for HR functions and client facing systems
Be aware that although powerful, API’s are not built equally and something that performs well in a mature system like SAP may not provide the same data and consistency in something like MYOB. The ability to manipulate the data is a critical aspect of connecting multiple data sources
Time-consuming and labour-intensive manual reporting
The window for generating daily reporting not big enough to generate reports on time
Sites spread across multiple geographies and time zones
Manual, static Microsoft Excel reports to consolidate data into PowerPoint and then emailed each day