In just a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit millions of businesses in more than 200 countries head-on. The vast majority of these businesses experience a significant drop in sales and revenues. Small enterprises, which generally have a less financial margin, are more than ever in difficulty. Many find themselves in dire financial straits due to the fallout from the coronavirus epidemic, or worse yet, are closing their doors. Physical remoteness has become necessary to reduce the rate of infection, and the majority of humanity is forced to remain confined.
However, economic activity must continue. And in atypical times like this, even more flexibility and adaptation are needed to launch new management tools in the crisis. In this sense, data analysis is an increasingly powerful tool when it comes to performance and management. And in atypical times, it is essential to have an understanding of your processes. Thus, data analysis in times of crisis is crucial to plan and organize for the future.
How data analytics is going to help your company?
At the business level, having tools to perform data analysis is vital for making decisions. You can carry out this analysis using a platform in which you can create data visualizations such as dashboards, graphs, KPIs, or maps. But perhaps the tool is the last link in the chain in a Data-Driven company. Thus, you must create a data culture in which all the people involved in the company are familiar with working daily with data.
In addition to this, you must try to ensure that all areas of the company are digitized, in this way; each department will generate data periodically that we can subsequently analyze. Examples of digitization in companies can be the use of ERPs for internal management, CRMs for sales management, project management applications, production systems in the industry, sensor readings, etc.
Taking into account the above, these are the four ways in which Data analytics will help your company in this crisis:
Offers a deeper knowledge of the public
At first, it is worth noting that data analysis offers a deeper understanding of your target audience. Through the information produced in the company’s internal systems records, such as ERP, BI, and CRM, or by external sources, as is the case with social networks. It is possible to better understand the profile and behavior of potential customers of its products and services, as well as stakeholders (business partners, employees, suppliers, etc.).
With all this information available, managers can outline goals and action plans more in line with the reality of the business, in addition to directing their efforts to meet the points that need to be changed. Thus, each strategy worked on will be formulated to meet specific aspects of the company, making decision-making more efficient.
Increases confidence
The management team is constantly dealing with new challenges and, therefore, needs to be prepared to make efficient decisions. Following this idea, managers who do not have strategies to clearly understand the conditions of the company’s internal processes, as well as the current situation of customer service, those are unable to manage their activities consistently. This makes business management insecure and prone to multiple risks within each decision. Because of this, investment in data analysis is of great importance to assist the management team in their work. With the reading and study of all the information circulated in the products and customer service sectors, confidence is increased to estimate new action plans and goals to evolve the company’s services.
Saves your time
The famous saying that time is money makes perfect sense when we have to make quick and effective decisions.
By automating data integration processes, we can interconnect all the company’s data sources, both internal and external, and store them in a central data warehouse or Data Warehouse that contains historical data. These processes generally called ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) processes are vital so that the data from all our systems can be analyzed in a data visualization tool.
Each of these data integration processes can be executed automatically and will contain the logic necessary for the calculation of the analysis indicators or KPIs that we have defined in our company. This automation means that we can be saving a lot of time in management tasks, tasks that, without being automated, could take days or weeks to complete (for example, the closing sales report of all our commercial subsidiaries) and start executing in a few minutes.
Facilitates internal communication
A Data-Driven company that is managed from data must use tools that facilitate communication between employees. And in the data analysis part, this is very important since the platform you use must be accessible from anywhere and available at any time.
And, in a crisis like the current one, the tool is more crucial since teleworking, or remote work is encouraged (and sometimes imposed), which means that the people who have to make decisions need to have the data and visualize it correctly from anywhere.
Fortunately, there are data analysis tools, including Biuwer, called Modern BI, that are deployed in the cloud and that meet all the availability, accessibility, and security requirements. An important aspect is that the data visualization platform is secure so that you can configure access to the different reports and dashboards, so that specific users or groups of users do not access sensitive or protected information.
Concluding remarks
The analytical data can be helpful while translating information into action and, these can be reflected in underwriting profits and increasing revenues.
Start seeing your data as an asset, just as important as your products, services, and collaborators. Data and analysis are the key accelerators of transformation.