According to Accenture, 87% of employees believe the importance of data but only 25% are able to effectively utilize their data to make better work decisions. As a shop manager, you are in charge of monitoring and analyzing the important data that comes from sales, inventories to staff performances. However, how many of your business decisions are supported by the data that you have? Do you sometimes struggle on utilizing the data that you have? This is why more and more companies turn to smart tools like Business Intelligence (BI) softwares that could help them better understand the collected data. . So let’s take a look at how BI could help us to make data-driven decisions.
How To Use BI To Make Data Driven Decision
Providing An Overview Of Business Performance
Presenting Data In Easy-To-Understand Visual Aids
Using Predictive Analytics To Make Accurate Forecast
1. Providing An Overview Of Business Performance Usually, a new business that starts off with a few kind of products might not feel the
need to use BI software when they could just see all sales data in just one tab of its excel sheets. However, as the variety of your shop grows along with your shop development, you might realize that it takes more and more time for you to obtain key metrics in your shop such as the average amount of money spent by each customer and the most popular purchase-with-purchase item. That is the time you realize that you will need to go through more than several tabs in your excel file to copy, paste, compile and re-organize all the data before you can obtain the information that you need.
For instance, one of my friends who is a Shopee seller once shared with me about his headache on determining the best promotion package combination for his shop. Even though all the data was being recorded on the platform, he still found it difficult to integrate all the sales data that he had. Eventually, he just gave up analyzing this data and chooses to make a promotion package based on his gut. When the promotion package was launched, the sales did not turn out according to his expectation.
On the other hand, if your business is being supported by BI software, you could see the customizable metrics that are ready for you to utilize to make an informed business decision. For example, if you are a fast food vendor that uses BI software, you could easily determine the most popular side dish and also the average spending value of the customer for their lunch or dinner. This information would help you to quickly determine the best combination of lunch and dinner promotion packages that would attract more sales. Thus, this shows how BI would save you from the hassle of these tedious data re-organization tasks, allowing you to see the big picture and make fast and informed decisions through a few glances on the BI dashboard.
2. Presenting Data In Easy-To-Understand Visual Aids
As a shop manager, you might also need to present your data to other stakeholders and even use it to coach your employees. As a shop manager is the one overseeing the day to day operation and performance of the shop, you might easily understand the relationship between the level inventory, sales and team’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Nevertheless, when the shop manager shows this data to other stakeholders, the data would just appear to be lists of figures and numbers that do not make sense. For instance, if the shop manager would like to get buy-in on his promotional package proposal, it might take hours for him just to compile all required data together and then transform the data into easy-to-understand visual aids.
With BI, you can speed up this process without worrying about human errors that could corrupt the data. After extracting the visual aids such as pie chart, bar and line graph from your BI dashboard, you could proceed to present the information to your stakeholders. It would then enable you to better convince the stakeholders on your business proposal while saving you from the hassle of re-organizing the data.
3. Using Automated Tools To Manage KPI
Besides that, one of the key responsibilities of a shop manager is to conduct constant progress checking on his team’s KPI. Nevertheless, as a shop manager, you have many other responsibilities to be fulfilled such as managing other stakeholders like suppliers and upper managers. Thus, you might not be able to monitor the performance of your employees all the time. For example, you want to track the daily performance of your promotion package. It means that you have to spend time everyday looking through the figures in your database just to monitor the progress of your KPI. Nevertheless, with the aid of BI software smart features, it allows you to set predetermined goals or conditions. If your shop performance does not meet the conditions and goals according to your planning, it would automatically remind you through email or messages to prompt you for quicker decision making, preventing lost time to react to the critical situation.
All in all, these are the 3 reasons how BI could help retailers make data-driven decisions. Indeed, as a shop manager, there are a lot of tasks, people and data to be taken care of. Isn’t it great if you could have a smart BI “assistant” that enables you to understand your entire shop performance in just a few glances on the dashboard, provides your shop data in the most presentable way and helps you to manage your staff performance through automatic reminders. Imagine the time you have spent going through all your shop data. Do you think it would be better utilized if you spend them to think of other strategic business decisions? BI software could sound sophisticated to you and you might think that it is only meant for big companies. However, it is actually more affordable than it sounds. In fact, it has been used by a lot of small and medium businesses to develop their business. Interested to know more about the presentation of BI reports on your shop’s dashboard? Fret not! Inquire now or check out our solutions to take an in-depth look at how you can adopt BI for your business today!
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