Creating a business that succeeds involves fostering a decision-making process that enables the organization to make solution-centric decisions. It’s a move away from a hierarchal process to one that places decision-making in the trenches of the day-to-day work, creates an organizational structure that eliminates information silos and shares decision-making with the most experienced, informed employees. How do you do this?
Everyone talks about big data, but volumes of data that do not provide insights do not help your business. You need to blend your source data creating meaningful, usable information, which can be visualized into actionable insights that provide value to your business.
Analyzing your supply chain can help streamline processes and simplify acquisitions, but it also helps identify and eliminate waste, manages cashflow and uncovers risk patterns.
The manufacturing industry and field service industry are facing a growing problem – how to capture tribal knowledge from an aging population of workers. At the 2019 Field Service Conference in Amelia Island, FL, this topic was widely discussed amongst industry representatives.
By: Dmitriy
When most people think of ML, they imagine a team of data scientists, high overhead costs for computer hardware and timelines that stretch into quarters or a year before seeing results. But today the market is filled with automation tools and cloud-based computing power. ML, AI, and Big Data are available more than ever. It is now easier for medium to large-size businesses to start using and applying these advancements in business intelligence technology to grow and improve their business.
One of the things I enjoy about our work in analytics is the variety of business problems we solve. While the specifics of the problem vary, our overall objective is always to derive value from the data. Putting the client’s needs first means that we adjust our approach to best fit the situation rather than fixate on a specific tool or pre-selected solution. This variety makes the work exciting, but it also creates challenges in staffing the appropriate skills. Over the years, I have come to refer to our solution to this challenge with the phrase “Analytics is a team sport.”
The term predictive analytics refers to the analysis of existing data to create forecasts that when properly applied, help avoid future problems. While kaizen helps spot problems live on the manufacturing floor, using predictive understanding methods provides an opportunity to:
There’s a reason why businesses are trending towards big data. Data analytics can be used to isolate areas of a business that need to be improved, in addition to paring down to the areas of the business that are performing most successfully. Through an internal audit, a business can fine-tune and streamline its business processes, ultimately using performance metrics to improve its productivity and revenue.
It’s often easier to reduce an organization’s costs than it is to increase its income, but the bottom line is the same — an increase in revenue. If you’re looking for ways to streamline your expenditures and improve your cost savings, it’s time to look at your analytic data.
Your expense sheet holds all of the information you need to identify potential opportunities. Identify your largest suppliers and vendors and begin there. Look for opportunities to:
Visualized, aggregated data gives you valuable insights that you might not be able to see on a spreadsheet. This is the premise behind big data visualization: large-scale patterns may only be visible once data is consolidated, analyzed, and visualized. Using the right software solutions, you can better understand where your organization is spending the bulk of its money. From there, you can look at ways to fine-tune your operations.
A supplier may not just be costing you money in terms of raw materials. Assessing supplier performance is also necessary to determine the full impact of their costs. Are delays making it necessary for your organization to delay products? Have mistakes in the supplier chain required returns or additional administrative processing? Supplier performance impacts efficiency, which can impact the system as a whole.
At the same time, contract compliance must also be enforced. If suppliers are required to deliver product under certain guidelines — and they are not doing so — then they are not performing up to their contract. Issues of compliance must be enforced if negotiations are to be useful.
In addition to making decisions based on current spending, you must also consider future spending. If certain areas of your business are about to grow and expand, then your organization needs to focus on developing out these sectors and reducing costs within them. If areas of your organization are starting to become obsolete, then their cost savings benefits are going to be minimal.
Data analysis is not effective if it isn’t used to affect change. Once your cost savings data has been analyzed, it’s time to make simple, clear, and functional changes to the spending of the departments that it impacts.
If you want to reduce spending in your organization, comprehensive data analysis is the most effective way. Through better data analysis, you can drill down to your organization’s spending habits, discovering inefficiencies and identifying trends. Of course, this also requires the right software and the right business processes. You can find out more through the experts at Starr & Associates.