Business Insights at your fingertips – your path to building an Intelligent Enterprise

“Give me the truth. Give me the facts” – says every world leader dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic today. While we are staying home and staying safe, the one thing all of us are consuming is information.

At 1 PM every day, just like most of you, I tune in to watch our Prime Minister give an update on the COVID-19 situation. What gives me assurance about these updates is that they are not gut-based, but backed by solid facts and data. Now, more than ever, data has emerged as the hero in saving the world.

In principle, isn't running a business similar to running a country, albeit on a very different scale? Just like the cabinet, a business has portfolios such as finance, sales, marketing, people, IT, operations, security, and more.

If you are like any other business leader around the world right now, I can imagine you will be under more pressure than ever to deliver critical insights to the business rapidly. As decision-makers of your company or department, how do you make decisions? Are they backed by data in real-time?

Do you know how your customers or citizens are feeling right now; are they happy, are they frustrated, are they looking to move away from your services?

Are you able to get the pulse of your business operations while sitting at home? How many flour packets are needed to keep the shelves stocked? Are we meeting the demand for milk?

Can our manufacturing plant meet the growing demand? Will the machines perform to meet their target Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) or will they fail? Can we proactively take action to improve the availability of our machines so they can meet the demand?

Brace yourselves, the questions above can be answered with the help of data and analytics! Businesses have never been short of data, but they have not been able to maximize the value of this data. The use of analytics on top of this data has the potential to unlock how you, the decision-maker, understand the story of your organization; the customers, the financials, the operations in the past, present, and future. Insight into the above can tremendously improve how you respond to your customer demands.

Where can you start?

1. Start by understanding the vision for your business

2. Define your Key Performance Questions (KPQs) i.e. the burning questions you need answers to

3. Do a stock take of your data assets that will help answer those questions. Examples of data assets include customer, product, supplier, location, etc.

4. Bring all disparate data assets together into a resilient and robust Azure cloud data platform. Get data experts to clean and build data models on it

5. Visualize and interact with your data using Power BI dashboards

Once you’ve done it all, you will have information about your people, finance, sales, marketing, and operations at your fingertips.

Now re-imagine what you can do with all that data…

• What if end-to-end processes were automated?

• What if you could operate 10x faster, or 10x more cost-effectively?

• What could you do tomorrow that you’re not doing today?

That is what an automated enterprise looks like. That is what the future of business looks like. This is the role that data can play in re-imagining your operations. All of the above may seem overwhelming at first, but we’ve got your back.

Talk to me if you would like to get started with your data initiative.

Don’t think, get started!