In today’s technology-based business environment, only a few companies can survive without business intelligence. If you would like to take your business to the next level, you might need to invest in analytics software that delivers real-time information about your productivity, profits, and development areas.
Some companies even allow business analytics software to carry out their risk assessment, and monitor their growth using advanced technology. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of the latest development, it might be time to consider making business intelligence your priority to enable growth and better decision-making. Find out below how to tell that your company could benefit from more intelligence.
1. Workflow issues
If you are in the manufacturing business, workflow issues can cause distraction and missed deadlines. It is, however, hard for managers to pinpoint what the problem is, and it is likely that your workers will point their fingers at each other, which is not going to help you solve the problem.
If you implement a business intelligence solution to record the time each process takes in your company, you can identify the weaknesses in your workflow and instantly improve your productivity. Monitoring your workflow will help you find out what you can do better to reduce manufacturing times and serve customers better.
2. Slow growth
If your company is not able to grow, and you don’t know the reason why you might want to record financial and production information and dig deeper. Chances are that you will have to gather information about the latest industry trends and customer behavior. If your customers’ expectation has changed, but your company hasn’t addressed these changes, you will be left behind, unable to grow.
3. Cash flow problems
If you find yourself dealing with liquidity problems and find it hard to pay your suppliers and employees, you need to find the underlying issue before it is too late. Business intelligence can tell you whether you have too many invoices outstanding after the due date, or you have to pay your suppliers before you would get paid by your customers. Sometimes a simple software can tell you whether you have a low-profit-margin or too much waste within your production line that makes it impossible to budget.
4. Low productivity
If your company’s productivity is low, and you don’t know how to improve it, put business intelligence to good use. Chances are that if you moved all your employees on an early shift, or added support, you could help them achieve better results. Gather feedback from the team, and find out the most productive processes and the ones that are less efficient. Providing additional training for the staff based on data can improve your company’s effectiveness and productivity.
5. Complicated processes
If your company has several complicated processes employees carry out on a day-to-day basis, it might be hard for you or a line manager to see where the problem is. However, if you break down each process and record data, you can identify the bottlenecks or the least productive departments and provide them support.
6. Supply chain issues
Keeping an eye on your suppliers and deliveries is a challenging task without business intelligence. You might want to use a software for data visualisations to see clearer about the problems in your supply chains. Chances are you might be paying too much or be on a flexible contract that suits the delivery company’s needs, but not your business.
To identify supply chain problems, you need to add checkpoints at the origin, destination, and during delivery. If you have communication issues with your suppliers or customers, this will also be highlighted by the report produced by the business software.
7. Slow reporting
If you have to chase your department leaders and supervisors for reports, you might want to create them yourself using automated business intelligence collection methods. You will be able to record downtime, productivity, and staffing levels if you put the right system in place. This will help you get a real-time report anytime, instead of monthly production graphs that might not be relevant or reliable. The main benefit of adding a business intelligence software to your business infrastructure is that you can generate a real-time report anytime.
8. You are depending on spreadsheets
If your company still depends on spreadsheets and employees spend time manually recording the same information multiple times, you are wasting money and time. You can get a central business intelligence console created for your business that will collect and analyze different data, depending on what you are interested in. Your invoices are automatically added to your financial software, so you know how much money customers owe you, and how many invoices are overdue.
9. Your competition is squeezing in
When your company is losing its market share rapidly, it might be time for implementing smarter analytics that will tell you more about the market and the behavior or the competition. Without gathering business intelligence, you will be shooting in the dark. Make sure that you find a company that will design the program that is relevant to your industry and gives you the data you can use to beat the competition.
10. You don’t act on reports
If you are being presented with spreadsheets and tables, but the reports are not actionable or clear, you should invest in business intelligence and analytics software. Today, even simple apps can give you a graphical representation of your sales trends and identify your best selling products, or calculate your profit margins on each product or service. You can also work out the number of employee hours delivering a service costs you, so you can make adjustments. Reports that don’t include actionable information are not worth anything.
11. You are losing staff
When companies face high turnover, there is usually a reason. Instead of going around the office asking people in person, you can create regular employee surveys and find out what is missing. If some of your employees are not feeling respected and values, they will let you know through the anonymous questionnaire. When you find that employees are more likely to leave one team, you might want to sit down with the line manager to find out what the reason is, but if you don’t have this information, you cannot act.
12. You spend too much time compiling data
If you have to visit many software, apps, and spreadsheets to get an answer to your business related question, it might be time to step up your game and invest in intelligent infrastructure that automatically gathers and analyzes information. You might be wasting precious time that you could be spending on developing a new strategy that takes your company to the next level.
13. You are not sure you have your priorities right
A business that doesn’t have priorities is simply doing things instead of working towards goals. When you have intelligent business analytics solutions, you will be able to identify problems, opportunities, risks, and development areas, and act accordingly. If you don’t know where you got things wrong or where you can beat the competition, you simply can’t beat your competition.
All companies, big or small, can benefit from advanced business intelligence solutions. You can get a high return on investment, and make better strategic decisions long term. Whether you have a staffing issue or your profits are down, business analytics can help you identify and address the problem before it is too late. Stop wasting your time and money recording data multiple times and creating reports manually. Take advantage of the recent developments of business analytics software and make it your number one priority.