The value of a long-term strategy in analytics, reporting and BI.
We have been working with many of our clients for many years on their analytics solutions. In a lot of cases, the early projects were POCs and departmental solutions. However, with these long-term customers, they have recognised the value of a strategic analytics platform with no limits. This blog post by Pedro Alves talks aobut what I mean when I say “no limits”.
These customers typically have a long term view (often family-owned), have a CIO or other innovative leader, and understand building a business’s capability to do analytics is an important piece of the puzzle. Every company needs an analytics strategy in order to move forward.
I recently visited one of these customers of ours and was extremely impressed with what they were doing with analytics. This was not just the typical analytics about finances, HR, and operations – but actually coal-face analytics that helped them develop a better product, with significantly higher profit potential. The result was a “real-time” dashboard that allowed operators on the shop floor to modify the product mix to optimise product quality and profitability.
Setting up this real time dashboard was something they were able to do in response to a request from the executive team in several weeks out of current capability and investments. They didn’t have to bring consultants in, invest in infrastructure, or buy new tools.
In order to deliver this functionality they had to modify a process that collected information daily into a real -time process and then build a dashboard on top of that increased frequency data. As they were using the Pentaho platform and were already collecting this information, this was a small incremental change rather then a big strategic project.
What I’ve learned from this project is analytics as a project is a journey of capability building and having a flexible deployable product means that you have an important companion as you move down that journey.
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Zachary Zeus
Zachary Zeus is the Founder of BizCubed. He provides the business with more than 20 years' engineering experience and a solid background in providing large financial services with data capability. He maintains a passion for providing engineering solutions to real world problems, lending his considerable experience to enabling people to make better data driven decisions.