Accelerating “Contribution to your Business” Through DWI and BI

As we begin this new year, it becomes paramount that we discuss a few of the key issues on business management‘s priority list. This is important because, from year-to-year, and quarter-to-quarter, management is continually seeking the answer to difficult questions about increased efficiency and effectiveness, lower costs, increased revenues and profits, or just understanding your ‘contribution to the business’. Maybe this last item encompasses the previous questions and also provides you a special opportunity to convert your work and ideas into real actionable intelligence which drives the business (not just reports on the happenings of the past periods). This is the new key success factor or KPI (as some of management seem-to/want-to monitor).

Business Intelligence, Customer Experience Management and CRM, plus managing inventories and capital resources are clearly on the top of management’s priority list. How do you contribute to these areas and what uses of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) bring major benefits to your organization. This is not to address limited uses in selected departments, but the promulgation and successful usage of the productive …

As we begin this new year, it becomes paramount that we discuss a few of the key issues on business management‘s priority list. This is important because, from year-to-year, and quarter-to-quarter, management is continually seeking the answer to difficult questions about increased efficiency and effectiveness, lower costs, increased revenues and profits, or just understanding your ‘contribution to the business’. Maybe this last item encompasses the previous questions and also provides you a special opportunity to convert your work and ideas into real actionable intelligence which drives the business (not just reports on the happenings of the past periods). This is the new key success factor or KPI (as some of management seem-to/want-to monitor).

Business Intelligence, Customer Experience Management and CRM, plus managing inventories and capital resources are clearly on the top of management’s priority list. How do you contribute to these areas and what uses of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) bring major benefits to your organization. This is not to address limited uses in selected departments, but the promulgation and successful usage of the productive results of these information systems management resources.

This brings to mind numerous examples of success in many industries which has been achieved by our customers utilizing Teradata’s vast selection of solutions to acquire, consolidate, integrate, access, visualize, and utilize data (or better yet information or knowledge) into the decision-processes of many firms.

WHERE CAN I DISCUSS MUCH MORE ABOUT THIS APPROACH ?
AT&T, Bank of America, Banque Populaire, Carrefour, Cisco, DHL Express, eBay, Lufthansa, Nokia, SFR, SwissCom, Telefonica will all discuss their journey to success in using the Teradata DW Solutions at a management conference in Berlin on April 11-14, 2010. These and many other Teradata customers will discuss their processes, the results, and the changes achieved in their businesses. This conference known as “The Enterprise Intelligence Summit” can be understood better by clicking through to www.TeradataEMEA.com.

What might you do, even if you cannot attend such a conference of successful winners?
Well, it might include reviewing what your team accomplishes in understanding customer attrition, churn management, offer preparation and delivery, event-based marketing, metrics regarding essential activities (or common dissatisfaction areas of customers), and constant intelligence gathering and distribution to people who can act upon the recently gained insight to drive actions which involve your customers (and their retention, satisfaction, experiences, or needs analysis).

SOME ADDITIONAL SUCCESSFUL APPROACHES
Secondly, it might be more important to look at the high expenditures for marketing, sales, support, distribution, inventories, capital asset usage, and the like, to ensure that BI Analytics are not just reporting on their past metrics; but now driving with ACTIVE Enterprise Intelligence (meaning cross-organizational knowledge) to achieve quick payback and better decision making.

Third, think of all of the decisions that are being made in your company during the time that you are reading this article. It could be hundreds or thousands that are affecting your customers, channels, competitors, or even partners. What percentage of these thousands of decisions, that affect these revenue producing resources, actually are the SAME questions and decisions that were made last year last month, or even last week? Think about loans, credit, payments, resource usage, personnel management and allocations, food or resource distributions, acquiring perishables, or even shipping items to your stores, planes, branches, customers, or partners. If 80-80% of these decisions could be made online (NRT), using integrated detail data within a cross-organizational view of your customers or channels, and then you have an opportunity to reduce waste and redundancy and make a major contribution to the productivity and effectiveness of your business. This is called providing a ‘rules based’ BI system online to the customers or to the decision-makers, which substitutes or enhances the process and reduces major costs. For the remaining portion of the decisions that could not be made by the DW or BI processes, then a human would have to do more research, make contacts or acquire additional knowledge, and then proceed with the ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ decisions.

SUMMARY and RECOMMENDATION
So, what are you doing that is creative and contributing to your company? we’d like to hear more about it and tell your story and make you more ‘famous’ or just give you a pat on the back. Isn’t it worth it for your upper management to know that you are contributing in ways that they probably have desired for years, but maybe haven’t been able witness or make happen without a strong and vibrant BI/DW solution? Let’s accelerate them from Theory to Reality to Profitability based on your BI/DW efforts.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Ron Swift
www.teradata.com/RONSWIFT