Why Quality Data Collection is Vital to BI Performance
This weekend my wife and I hosted Mike and Donna, friends of ours from New England, at our house in Philadelphia. In between bouts of cooking, wine drinking and the requisite tours of the city’s historic and cultural sites, Mike and I got to talking about work. He’s an efficiency analyst at a large waste management company and had just completed the first stage of a pilot project to test out the results of a major data crunch designed by the firm to enhance efficiency and reduce costs.
The analysis, which took months to finish, dug into all aspects of the company’s operations, including when drivers show up for work, how they map their routes, when and where they take lunch, and exactly how their logs are recorded by data entry personnel at the end of each shift. Mike even helped devise the most efficient method for getting hundreds of trucks out of the lot in the fastest, safest manner based on an analysis of parking practices at dozens of facilities.
The tests are ongoing, but the company is already seeing the results: a measurable decline in accidents, fewer customer complaints, lower fuel costs and a decline in overtime. A key factor in the process was having insight into the right metrics.
Mike’s story reflects a growing trend today as businesses both large and small tap into next-generation solutions such as analytics, machine-to-machine connectivity, mobile communications, GPS, telematics and RFID to employ cutting edge but often simple management techniques that would once have seemed impossible to implement.
That’s because the foundation of so-called Business Intelligence is an array of once unwieldy data that businesses now have the power to digest and put to radical new uses.
Largely pioneered by the transportation sector through fleet management technologies, today BI performance analytics are empowering all manner of industries – from employees in the field all the way up to the C-Suite.
According to a new survey by Gartner and the Financial Executives Research Foundation, BI and business performance applications are high on finance executives’ wish list for 2013; and 15 of the top 19 business processes that CFOs have identified as requiring improved technology support are largely addressed by BI, analytics and performance management technologies.
The survey found that the top four areas of investment will be solutions that facilitate analysis and decision making, performance monitoring, collaboration and knowledge management.
But having such tools in place is useless without the data to power them, which makes quality data collection an integral component of any BI strategy. Data is collected from various sources – customer interactions, employee logs, sales records, expense reports, you name it. And a variety of methods or techniques are used in its collection – including CRM, social media and good old fashioned data entry. Warehousing the right data is where Business Intelligence starts, which is why experts recommend periodically evaluating what data your teams are collecting and why, and purging data that is no longer essential. To ensure optimal performance of your BI machine, make sure you’re feeding it the right fuel.