Data is great isn’t it? It’s nice to look at all those amazing dashboards that your business application offers you. If you’ve taken any time to analyze the data available to you, you probably have some interesting analytics on your business delivery. Whether you’re in manufacturing, accounting, customer service, or another line of work – having all that data available to you is invaluable for helping you figure out how to optimize your organization. But what areas can you most easily optimize using the data available to you? Depending on what types of tools and software your employees are using, there are a few different areas of business that you can optimize with big data:
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- Sales
If you’re using some sort of CRM tool like Salesforce, Sugar CRM or even HubSpot Sales, you can gather a lot of data about your won or lost opportunities as well as buyer behavior and interaction. If your sales reps are diligent about logging sales activities, you should be able to easily extrapolate what methods are effect or not based on which deals are closing. This data can be a game changer for most businesses and completely revolutionize your sales process once you’ve qualified a prospect. - Production
If you’re in the business of making things, then data is your best friend. You need to leverage every single piece of data to make your production or manufacturing crew more efficient, but you can’t do that until you collect and analyze your data. From cycles to cost of materials down to shipping and freight, your process works because you’ve refined it over the years. Using your data to help you further refine it, carefully shop vendors and further reduce costs can do a lot for your bottom line. Big data is invaluable here to innovating your processes and ensuring that you continue to outpace your competition and price yourself competitively. - Finance
Most businesses use programs like Quickbooks or a custom line of business application to management their finances. Because this is the heart of your revenue generation, you have to leverage any data available to you within that application. Familiarize yourself completely with the reports functions within your version of Quickbooks, and even consider some custom reporting options. The data found within your finance application can help you optimize your chart of accounts, understand your inventory and job costs and understand how to better manage your finances and plan more effectively from a budget perspective for your upcoming year.
There are so many other areas of your company that can benefit from Big Data and analytics, from your internal IT support to customer service. Use the data available to you in that expensive application you pay for to help you optimize your business. Dashboards are fun to look at it, but ultimately you have to identify the areas of your business that need improvement. A continually evolving business is a recession-proof business, because it’s one that almost always outpaces its competition.
