The most open business and technology blog

From six different studies we conclude that approximately only 5% of employees use BI tools to perform Analytics effectively^*.

I think this is in part related to the fact that except for folks with backgrounds in science, engineering, economics or finance; most people across the company do not feel too comfortable around numbers, math or logic. I've seen this during many years of training corporate employees on the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Analytics.

The traceability is an important component of the requirements imposed to food industry by the European Union. And means the need of controlling the history of a meat product, from raw material until the final product and its location after sale or distribution. In other words, by traceability the manufacturing process conforms to the European legislation and quality standards.

What this means? For example, when a contamination occurs, the meat manufacturer will have to remove its entire production from the market. And that because the identification of compromised lots will not be possible in the absence of a solution able to store all information related to raw materials entered in their composition. For any producer who wish to increase profit, its essential to be able to track the raw materials sources, the processing of those materials, the products lots on batch, the returns and losses.

For this reason, the purchasing of an IT system has become a essential condition for Romanian meat producers and processors to fulfill both EU requirements and increase profit. Unfortunately, most Romanian meat producers do not buy whole systems of production management activities, do not implement an ERP solution, but only a few modules which do not concern automation.

According to a marketing research performed by students at Economics and Business Administration Faculty from Babeş Bolyai University, only 48% from the Romanian companies bought a software to control the production process and other 19% took into consideration adoption of software solutions for traceability reasons. 33 procents of romanian meat producers not have budget for such an investment, not heard from the existence of such software or failed to identify on the market a software that meet their business needs.

In such conditions, the question I ask is: will be able the Romanian meat producers and processors to face competition and to comply with traceability rules without purchasing any IT systems for production chain management?

Even in the case of extremely small businesses, a strategic deployment of a Business Intelligence solution can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company. Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes. Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.
- Should we treat all customers equally? (If you say yes, I’d suggest reading “Angel Customers & Demon Customers”)
In a company that has more than thirty customers, the Pareto Principle will be evident. Looking inside the famous 80/20 rule one can find that five percent of the customers generate close to 50% of the profits while the bottom 50% of the customers generate only 5% of the total profit. Many companies have a hard time identifying which customers belong to each group. A strategic deployment of Business Analytics provides the answers instantly.
Even when sales revenue is growing, management should be able to ask key questions and find the answers right away, so the train of thought isn’t interrupted:
- Is revenue growing profitably? Where? How and Why?
- Are we paying sales reps commissions for bringing in unprofitable tonnage?
- Can we quickly tell whether the growth trend is just over last month, last quarter, same quarter last year or year to date?
- How about the profit growth of the last 52 weeks compared to the previous 52 weeks? Is it really growing?
- Is our growth accelerating or decelerating? How much?
- How is our profit growth versus budget or business plan? Where is it failing to meet objectives? Why?
- Which competitors are threatening our business?
- In what regions and market segments can we maximize our growth?
A BI solution is fundamental to find answers to the seven layers of WHY's in order to get to the root cause of issues. Being able to understand and correct these issues faster than the competition provides the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is. In the past deploying a BI solution was not affordable by small companies, not only due to licensing cost but also because the internal and external resources needed for set-up and maintenance.

Finding the right ERP software for your business is, sometimes, a very difficult process. Why that?
In the first place, because the analysis of your company needs are not complete.
Second, cause your expectations are a little bit unrealistic.
To simplify the entire process of finding the right ERP for your company, you must follow those 5 steps:
1. Set clear objectives implementation, acceptance criteria and, especially, your business requirements;
2. Awareness of technological change impact that will occur on the company processes, with direct influence over each employee work.
3. Check the market share and reputation of the vendors, its expertise in your field.
4. Check the supplier's ability to provide help in the reorganization of your business processes.
5. Ask for recommendations from other users of the ERP solution you want to implement.
After that, the whole process will appear much simpler and easier.

For any manufacturer and supplier of integrated management systems, the launch of an ERP solution is not an endpoint, but rather a new beginning. Because any such solution requires, over time, updating, correlation with legislation changes and functional adaptations designed to help users to improve / control / optimize businesses as much as possible.

While IT may own the physical aspects of the data (storage, security, format, connectivity, etc.), the Business (e.g. Marketing & Sales) must own its strategic meaning and be committed to auditing and maintaining its high quality.

A survey by Gartner Research found that poor data quality costs companies an average $8 million per year. In a different study published by The Data Warehousing Institute more than 50% of companies experience customer dissatisfaction and cost problems due to poor data.

In a time when the market forces companies to lower profits to maximum in order to earn new contracts, every penny spent elsewhere counts. And if, as a company, you own a large vehicles fleet over which you have no control whatsoever regarding its efficiency and productivity, that can mean your exclusion from the market or even bankruptcy.

But there is a solution by which you can control all costs involved by a fleet of vehicles and / or machines and you can have a clear image on undertaken activities, expenses and events occurring in the fleet. And this solution its named SocrateOpen Fleet Management. And with it, identifying and tracking each vehicle or machine is very easy. SO Fleet Management allows a comprehensive vehicle/equipment description with information on technical data (type, engine, category, capacity), registration data (temporary/final), procurement contract type (credit, leasing, custody, etc.), costs, maintenance, historical and planned inspections, rentals.

Also, it is a lot easier to operate mechanism by which the vehicles are allocated on people and by which the official report/protocol can be printed in small or detailed forms. Plus, with this solution you can track the insurance contract on each vehicle as standard functionality, the administrator being notified within a predefined number of days before the expiration of each insurance policy. The mechanism can be also applied to other car components with a validity period, like first aid kits or fire extinguishers.

What is extremely important to know is that in SocrateOpen Fleet Management was created a mechanism that allocates costs on resources, allowing the possibility to group them by source or cost categories, in order to obtain the profitability on vechicle.

What does this mean for your business? In short, efficiency, control, operational cost savings. You seem a bit?

With well over 500 million users around the globe, it’s no wonder that spreadsheets are the de-facto Business Intelligence/ Analytics application.