I recently attended a seminar related to Strategic growth and its interrelation with Business intelligence services. It also had an active participation from a good number of decision-makers and all CxO level professionals. It was amazing to see these super-successful people share their success and failure stories in front of 400+ participants. There were around 15-20 CEO’s from around the world who shared a list of challenges that they faced while they were going through a phase of converting their vision into reality. I found most of the challenges were common and equivalent to one another. Everyone face these challenges, but at different stages and may be in a different context.
Out of everything that I heard in the session, I was more interested in the types of challenges faced by them and how did they found out a solution for that. Some of the common ones are listed below:
Cost reduction: Key challenges in the initial phase were to identify those areas where the cost can be reduced and to take necessary actions to do so. Before BI tools, it was very difficult for any CEO from different industry sectors to find out the cost center and whether it justifies the investment. An in-house ERP system was there to generate a report and guide the decision-makers whenever needed, but it couldn’t guarantee whether the reports were accurate and reliable. Therefore, the investment in Business Intelligence Services was made by the decision-making authorities which ultimately helped them fetch any kind of data from any period at a right time.
Profit center identification: One of the most significant things in any business is the profit center identification. In order to identify this, the authorities must first understand the weak links in the organizations and how much loss are they facing through each of them. Once this report is in front of the management, it is much easier to make required arrangements and enhancements. The controlling authorities should be aware of everything happening in every unit and it was possible to acquire this kind stats only through a BI tool. A specific target was able to be defined by the authorities to eliminate these weak links.
Optimum utilization of resources: An ultimate example of this point can be smartphones. Smartphones nowadays have all kinds of features in the world, but what’s the use of it if you are just for making calls and receiving them. The best utilization would be when you would use the messenger facility, camera, personal assistance, navigation, music system etc. Similarly there are many resources in an organization which are underutilized and needs attention. This can be observed and transformed with the help of Business intelligence services. It will give you an accurate data about the resources which are not fully utilized, the areas where the efforts are lacking and the departments which need to improve on their part.
Consistency in enhancing the brand image: This is something that needs a constant attention and improvement from the core members of the organization. Competitor analysis is an important base for enhancing the brand image of any organization. To enhance anything, one must know and understand what’s going on in an organization. If a person is been given an access to each and every step that is been taken, he will be able to find the areas of improvement and where they can excel their performance to outperform and break their own records. Guess what will help in this case? Right, I am talking about Business Intelligence too.
Maintaining efficiency: The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. Every decision-maker is been assigned a duty to keep a track of how efficiently is each resource performing in his/ her domain. Business Intelligence facilitates a platform where the authorities can be sure whether things are going perfect or there is a scope to improve the efficiency of resources.
Let’s discuss rest of the challenges in the next part of this article.
HI Shweta. Very neatly written. Common Problems discussed with apt words.