Today’s business leaders are journeying through a tsunami of challenges: record inflation, cost increases, and both labor and material shortages. They face pandemic-hangover supply chain disruptions and shifting consumer demands.
How do they navigate teams through unprecedented change while still meeting stakeholder expectations and growing the business? The answer, for a majority of 2,000 C-suite executives recently executives surveyed by Accenture, is to use analytics to transform their business.
At the heart of this transformation is reducing cost and improving quality. As companies continue to move beyond pandemic survival mode, they’re examining all aspects of the business and focusing on maximizing investments and driving growth. Cutting costs sends dollars straight to the bottom line frees up funds to invest.
Enterprise data analytics tools – such as Tableau, Domo, Qlick, and PowerBI – put power in the hands of teams to get more insights out of their data, including saving time and money, and improving the quality of products and services.
Organizations can:
- Cut analysis time from hours to minutes
- Improve customer service with advanced insights
- Built a culture of self-service analytics.
With these tools, teams self-serve data analysis, drilling down into details underneath the totals, and then filtering raw data by parameters. Teams can share select insights with customers to help improve relationships and negotiate improved terms.
Teams can create and monitor proactive alerts and easily analyze trends. Managers can swiftly identify spikes and investigate unexpected activities outside of expected parameters. For example, excess labor hours can trigger a message to supervisors. With a monitoring dashboard in Tableau, operations managers can spot and understand the reason for anomalies.
Frequently, teams that used to spend hours scanning through spreadsheets manually are now able to analyze the same data in a matter of minutes.
An example of a successful data initiative is procurement analytics. Procurement teams can build a compliance checking engine including alerts and data visualizations in Tableau. The tool will track company purchases and message leaders if activities fall outside of adjustable criteria such as expense limits. Helping business units procure smarter enables the company to reduce costs.
The procurement team can quickly analyze purchase trends, then adjust approval limits and purchase categories to reduce staff time spent on getting approvals.
As part of the data digitalization drive, business units should use the data tools in their work. Train champions within teams, freeing up time and resources for the data science team to focus on building new analytics capabilities.
A successful cost transformation requires technology that provides visibility and a forensic view of costs to manage day to day and planned scenarios. Data visualization and easy analytics gives companies a competitive advantage.
Contact us to learn more. We have experience leading companies through all phases of implementing best-in-class data analytics