Investing in data and reporting can:
- Give organisations a competitive advantage
- Save organisations money
- Uncover efficiencies that were not immediately obvious
Use data for competitive advantage
Most organisations face some kind of competition. Your ability to service clients better than your competitors should ensure repeat business and a growing source of new clients. There are many ways to use data to inform the ways you service your clients. If your data is good it could tell you which clients have seasonality in their business – e.g. peak sales periods in spring/summer, a pattern of orders in a given week of each month, slower payment timeframes at certain times of the year.
It is not necessary for you to change those patterns, but rather use the insights from that data to inform the way you interact with your clients. If your data tells you client A has a peak sales period in spring/summer, then they’ll have a lot more time to catchup with you in autumn and winter. Calling them in the last month of winter to discuss broad opportunities to improve your commercial relationship is probably not the best time. The second month of autumn – i.e. after they’ve had a month to catch their breath from the busy spring/summer period – is probably a great time to get their attention, and to work collaboratively to improve and expand your commercial relationship.
Use data to save money
As many entrepreneurs will tell you: you need to spend money to make money… or in this case spend money to save money. If your organisation has solid data and reporting you should be able to identify cost savings. You may identify these savings simply by comparing costs of various activities provided by different suppliers or various internal teams. By comparing data week-by-week, for the past 3 years you may immediately see cost savings that were difficult to see when looking at the general ledger on a month-by-month basis.
Use data to uncover efficiencies
Bringing all your organisation’s data sources together in one reporting environment allows you to sit back and ask questions about the business. Questions which in the past may have been difficult to answer. Especially if in the past systems were not integrated together or data was not readily available. With the power of modern data and reporting tools information from a range of internal systems, cloud services and adhoc sources like Excel spreadsheets can be brought together in one place. Managers, business owners, analysts – anyone in an organisation – can then seek rapid answers to organisational questions.