Over the last few months, we have been trying to find the right answers to “What does the Business Insight Team provide?”, so this post is meant to be a starting point in an informational series with the goal of answering that not-so-simple question.
One of the primary goals of the Business Insight Team is to partner with our customers to help build a data warehouse and the related visualizations (charts, reports, web pages, etc.) to provide insight into their organization. These warehouses are generally built from a wide array of data sources that contain unrealized value to the organization. Below are some of the questions that our team could help your organization answer. What questions are your organizations trying to answer?
Financial
- Profitability Trends
- What is our current profitability?
- How does our current profitability compare with last month? Last year?
- Revenue/Expense Trends
- What is our forecasted revenue for Q3? For the fiscal year?
- How does our YTD/Quarterly/Monthly revenue compare with this last year/quarter/month?
- Identify Risk
- How does our revenue/expense/profit compare with the goals we’ve set?
- Are we at risk of losing money? Of not meeting shareholder expectations?
- Is there a specific project, product, person, or service that is under performing?
- Action-Profit Linkage
- Can we see the financial impact (positive or negative) resulting from a new organizational initiative?
- Can we see the level of profitability of each of our products, projects, people, or services?
Customer
- Differentiation/Value Add
- Is there visibility that we can provide to our customers that can differentiate us from our competitors?
- Breakdown of where their money is going
- Graphs of their usage over time
- Project status updates in real-time
- When will their project/product be complete
- Deeper or broader information from sources outside our company
- Is there visibility that we can provide to our customers that can differentiate us from our competitors?
- Can we provide mobile access to our customers?
- Satisfaction
- Can we see trends in the satisfaction of our customers?
- Can we correlate the profitability of our organization with the satisfaction of our customers?
- What is the perceived level of value that our products, projects, and services have provided to our customers?
- Retention
- What are the retention/return business rates of our customers for our different products, projects, and services?
- Is there a common attribute of products, projects, and services with low retention rates?
Internal
- Can we provide a greater level of satisfaction to our shareholders by providing them with visibility into the health of the organization?
- Can we create automated compliance reports for our governing body so that they don’t need to be manually generated each month/quarter/year?
- Can we see a real-time view of how we are doing in terms of accomplishing our quantifiable organizational goals?
- How many resources (people, machinery, buildings, vehicles, tools, computers, etc.) do we have? Versus last month/quarter/year?
Sales
- Can we find products, projects, and services that are commonly purchased together to provide a more competitive offering to our customers?
- Based on trends, do we need to bring in additional sales people?
- What sales approaches have been the most successful?
- What are our most commonly purchased products, projects, or services?
Production
- How many products, projects, or services did we complete this month/quarter/year?
- How does our current production rate compare with last month/quarter/year?
- Can we plan infrastructure capacity for the future using current trends?
- What is our capacity to take on new work?
- How big is the workload of each of our employees?
- Are our employees working too much? Or too little?
- Can we pinpoint products, projects, and services that are inefficient to drive innovation and change in those areas?
- How often are our processes failing or succeeding?
- How long does each of our products, projects, or services take to complete?
