Business Intelligence Blog

The need to know what decision-making is critical when everything is a priority has been highlighted by the pandemic. To democratize decision-making, an organization needs to break it down into manageable pieces. This ensures that responsibilities for making and executing critical decisions are transparent, and people have accurate data and technology to support them. An excellent way to determine what the important decisions are in your company is to look at the sources of value in your business and then organize the data-driven decision-making around them.

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Topics: Business Intelligence Basics, Job Role - Finance, Job Role - Executive, Financial Statements, decision-making, Dynamic reporting

ICU Medical is a leading global medical devices and accessories company selling medical devices for oncology, vascular therapy and critical care. The company has thousands of products in its portfolio so turned to industry-specific business intelligence software to track its business performance. Creating mobile BI dashboards has significantly changed the way ICU do business because now everyone has access to accurate real-time data; decision-making is the responsibility of all.

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Topics: Case Study, Job Role - Finance, decision-making, Dynamic reporting, business intelligence dashboards, data visualizations

According to research conducted by McKinsey before covid-19 hit, 92% of companies thought their business models would need to change in order to remain economically viable given their industry’s rate of digitization. Now, the pandemic has underscored that need, especially for businesses lacking the capabilities that have shown to be particularly robust during the lockdown, such as access to timely data or an online sales model. Leaders are now thinking strategically about ways to better use technology and data to proactively enable data-driven decision-making across all aspects of their operations to rebound successfully. 

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Topics: Job Role - Finance, Job Role - IT, Job Role - Executive, decision-making, data analytics

Business intelligence is used by many distributors who move and sell lots of product as its inventory management software. It is the tool of choice because inventory and operations managers can carry out inventory planning as well as produce up-to-date reports and dashboards that everyone across the business can access.

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Topics: Job Role - Inventory/Operations, decision-making

Being data driven means promoting fact-based decision making, driving user adoption of an analytics solution, and ensuring staff can gain insights from data. While this may look like a big managerial responsibility, it does not need to be a resource intensive task. During disruptions like Covid-19, data literacy pays off and enables confident whole-of-business responses, and helps people understand the big picture.

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Topics: Job Role - IT, decision-making, data analytics

Gold Medal International (Gold Medal) is a premier apparel supplier to leading department stores and sporting goods retailers across the U.S. As COVID-19 has taken center stage around the world, the team leading the third-generation family-owned business has relied heavily on its reputation with retail customers and the industry to instill confidence in the future. Data analytics has helped it understand its situation and move fast.

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Topics: Case Study, Business Intelligence Basics, Industry - Wholesale Distribution, Job Role - Executive, Industry - Retail, decision-making, data analytics

This Phocas blog highlights how one of our customers in wholesale distribution is coping with the new challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. The purpose is to outline specific issues, different strategies and to share knowledge. Team Medical Supplies is supporting its loyal customer base, who need its products more than ever to carry out essential health services during the crisis. Past purchasing data helps equitably distribute the highly sort after products and underpins the commitment to ethical decision making.

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Topics: Case Study, Business Intelligence Basics, Industry - Wholesale Distribution, decision-making, data analytics

The COVID-19 pandemic puts risk management and disruption strategies under the spotlight as companies experience limited supply and others are battling cashflow shortages. For businesses who move and sell products, inventory management can be a never-ending battle. During the shock of COVID-19, when supply and demand are volatile, managing stock presents further challenges. Strong visibility into your operations using data analytics principles can help manage inventory levels and keep cash flow steady.

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Topics: Business Intelligence Basics, Industry - Wholesale Distribution, Job Role - Executive, Industry - Retail, Job Role - Inventory/Operations, decision-making, data analytics

Phocas creates data analytics software. We have been helping businesses control and leverage their data for nearly 20 years, but for many people, data analytics is a new tool. Companies create information in the form of data. This information is valuable if you can translate it into useful insights. Data analytics software uses statistical techniques to cluster, segment and score what scenarios happened and then presents them in a simple format so businesspeople can make better decisions.

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Topics: Business Intelligence Basics, Industry - HVAC/Plumbing, Job Role - Executive, decision-making

Want to live the future backwards? A lesson learned during my course at Stanford is how intuition affects our decision making, positively and negatively. And the need for strategies to manage these feelings. Stanford Professor, Hayagreeva 'Huggy' Rao, introduced me to Gary Klein’s brilliant tool, called the premortem. The idea is to discuss all the things that can go wrong with a project before getting started. Effectively you 'put all the underground doubts above the ground.’ 

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Topics: Job Role - Sales, Job Role - IT, Job Role - Executive, decision-making