Читать книгу QlikView Your Business - Troyansky Oleg - Страница 4

How do we answer the question, “What information do we need for good decision making”? It starts with identifying the answers to the following questions.

What data do we need? What are the right measurements of performance and measurements of drivers of performance for your business? What are the right tools to analyze your business?

Introducing the Six Process Spheres

To know where to begin identifying data needed to help your associates maximize your results, it is important to understand the six basic groups of processes (we call them process spheres). The data from these spheres must be connected in order to maximize and sustain business results:

● Strategy is the guiding plan that helps define priorities in each of the mission-critical processes in the other five spheres. The strategy must be aligned with the other five spheres and vice versa in order to optimize business results. To be successful, your strategy needs to be converted into a set of measureable goals and include an action plan of implementation. Business intelligence dashboards play a critical role in communicating the tactics that support the strategy to the organization.

● Customer-facing activities involve any process that touches the customer. Included here are sales, marketing, service (orders on time and complete), logistics, product quality, and any other customer interaction. These activities define:

● How your customers view your company.

● Whether or not your company “qualifies” as a vendor.

● If your company provides value to the customers.

● If your company has a sustainable competitive advantage over your competition.

● Product development/innovation is ideally driven by requirements that come from outside of the company, as opposed to internal requirements. Strategy, customer facing-activities, and research are sources for input into product development/innovation activities. Product development/innovation includes marketing, research, trend data, regulatory requirements, customer requirements, and quality.

● Supply chain activities are essentially what they sound like. They are the chain of activities that allow the organization to supply products (or services) to its customers. The product must be delivered in accordance with agreed upon product specifications, delivery times, quantities, locations, and logistics. Supply chain activities include manufacturing, finished product and component sourcing, inventory management, warehousing, and shipping. Information from customer-facing activities, product development, and strategy are needed in order to optimize supply chain activities.

● Financial management requires accuracy of data transactions and aggregate records to meet the financial requirements of the business. Financial management includes cash flow management, internal controls, financial statement accuracy, and business financing. Without strong financial results, none of the other spheres of mission-critical activities is possible.

● Associate engagement may be the most important activity of all. It is critical that all associates understand how their work supports the strategy of the business and the objectives of each of the mission-critical processes embedded in the six spheres. Using BI dashboards to communicate strategic goals and measures of their achievements can help the company establish a culture of transparency and trust. The culture of trust is essential to driving continuous improvement and to creating sustainable profitable growth.

Understanding the measurements of the processes within these spheres is one key dimension of sustainable excellence in performance; the other key dimension is the connection between those spheres of processes. The connection between them is like the electrical system in your home or office. It’s the conduit of energy that makes things work. This conduit gives your organization the ability to “turn the lights on and off,” if you will. The employees and the technology they use represent the “wiring” in that conduit, and it needs to be in place, maintained, and updated.

Many organizations have what they believe to be the processes they need to manage the business. Every computer system we have seen, no matter how antiquated, has the basic data necessary to enable people to make informed decisions that lead to sustainable profitable growth. Often missing is the technology and the human knowledge necessary for extracting the data from the transactional systems, and the ability to use that data to visualize the six process spheres and the connections between them. Our role, as BI professionals, is to help companies connect the dots between fragmented pieces of information and uncover the “natural synergies” between their processes, their data, and their IT systems.

Figure 1-1 shows that the business world is indeed round, making it a continuum of connectivity that provides feedback to and from each of the six spheres of key business processes. The nucleus of this “world” is the people who interpret and act on the data. The axis around which this world rotates is financial management.

Figure 1-1: The six process spheres

Identifying Business Measures

Even with all the processes and connections in place, it is important to establish the right feedback mechanisms. Those feedback mechanisms include measures of performance and culture. While measurements of culture are extremely important, there is an entire field dedicated to understanding this topic, which is covered in separate literature. This book focuses on the measures of performance.

Business analytics typically look at two types of measures – measures of results and measures of drivers. In the BI jargon, they are called lagging indicators and leading indicators.

Measures of results, or the lagging indicators, communicate the outcome of what just happened. They are financial results and are focused on components of sales, operating income, return on investment (ROI), and cash flow. These are critical measurements of how a business has done, yet analyzing these measurements alone does not always give you the best answers as to why something happened and what will happen going forward, so that the enterprise can proactively make adjustments.

In contrast, measures of drivers, or leading indicators, are designed to reveal the reasons for certain results (good or bad) and possibly provide insight into future performance. Instead of measuring outcomes, they measure processes and activities that drive the outcomes.

For example, every company measures its sales, or top-line revenue, in comparison to the budget and to the prior year. The measurement is usually communicated as a dollar value and as a percentage. This is the measure of a result (or a lagging indicator). On the other hand, sales growth may be driven by many leading indicators, including:

● Change in volume vs. change in pricing

● Acquisition of new customers vs. lost customers

● Revenues driven by new products vs. revenues driven by existing products

● Measures of sales activities, such as the number of sales calls per day, closing ratios, and so on

● Measures of customer satisfaction and customer service

Each item in this list represents one or more of the drivers, or leading indicators, that contribute to the outcome of sales growth. Understanding and communicating those measures can have a significant impact on achieving strategic growth goals.

To give you a feel for the kind of data, the types of measures, and the business spheres that the data and measurements help connect, we have constructed Table 1-1 with some examples.

Table 1-1: Some Examples of Spheres Connected, Measurements, and Data Needed

Recall the example of the company that knew something was wrong but didn’t know what it was, presented in the “The Case for Business Intelligence” section earlier this chapter. The following list discusses how certain drivers could be measured better:

● The measure of service level drives future sales. For the company in this example, it turned out to be a measure that signaled that the company was not meeting customer requirements and therefore predicted the loss of sales.

● There were also drivers that lead to poor service levels that should have been monitored. Those measurements include forecast accuracy, inventory accuracy, and capacity utilization.

● Another issue that negatively affected the company was cash flow. The cash flow was negative even without significant investment in the assets or resources of the company. It prevented the company from investing in the right inventory, which would have helped timely fulfillment.

● Profitability issues drove the negative cash flow with existing customers. The ability to assess the direct contribution to profitability by product or customer would have been invaluable in avoiding non-profitable product lines and/or customers. It’s important that your organization stop doing things it doesn’t get paid for. This is very difficult when the company doesn’t know which activities it’s not getting paid for. Profitability reporting at its most basic level involves using data to calculate the margin.

A new management team implemented a number of these measurements and used analytics to make better business decisions, which began to turn around the business. Service-level measurements allowed the business to understand what was required to reach mass channel customers and retain them, and to identify and implement corrective actions to meet those requirements. They implemented forecasting processes and began to measure forecasting accuracy in order to better forecast demand. These efforts, combined with a focus on inventory management, in turn led to an organized production effort. That in turn led to customer orders being fulfilled completely and in a timely manner. Service levels were improved from below 40 % to over 98 % in a relatively short period of time, resulting in significant organic growth of the business.

This example is important because it demonstrates that data – combined with the right business intelligence tools and analytical techniques – can be used to help answer the ever-present business questions, why did something happen (good or bad) and what should we do about it.

What Companies Gain from Implementing BI

When companies consider implementing BI for the first time, they always spend a significant amount of time and energy on comparing costs between different tools, calculating the total cost of ownership, and deciding whether the company can afford such a significant investment. Companies often don’t realize what it costs not to implement BI. The cost of continuing to act in the dark can often be much higher than the most expensive BI tool.

With the help of BI, your management team can:

● Get a quick snapshot of the entire business.

● Make proactive decisions.

● Free up resources to focus on what truly optimizes the business.

● Achieve significant operational efficiencies across key functional areas of the business.

In order to accomplish this nirvana of analysis, there should not be different versions of the same data in the enterprise. For example, unit cost broken down into its components of labor, material, and overhead that reside in one area of your database cannot add up to something different than the total cost that resides in another “table” or database in the organization. Using business intelligence tools ensures that you can access the correct version of the data even if it resides in a variety of places in your information technology architecture.

Inevitably, different versions of the same data get created in any system. This is particularly true for smaller companies that do not always have the resources to install a new integrated ERP system. You don’t need to wait until you have the “perfect” ERP. With BI tools you can begin to build your analysis around the parts of your data that are correct and ignore the incorrect versions in the short term, in order to move forward with a better understanding of your business. If you wait for traffic to clear in each direction for a mile before crossing the road, you will likely never cross!

When BI technology is implemented throughout your company, beyond the top executive level, you can enable your associates to:

● Reach your customers in ways that give you a competitive advantage.

● Measure customer decisions to buy products/services. Understanding your customers’ needs can help you predict demand trends that in turn feed product development/innovation activities, production planning, sourcing activities, and working capital projections.

● Ensure that you are meeting customer service requirements so you keep and expand existing customers, at the very least, and create a value-add that allows the enterprise to penetrate new customer/channels, in the best case.