>The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy

>

Jill Dyché in her Information Management Blog “The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy” contests that companies

are pretty vague about the drivers for the new “Social Media”initiative.

Apart from the usual platitudes of “getting closer to employees, partners, and customers via lower-cost channels” it turns out very few business leaders can answer my question about the desired outcome of social media analytics.
In our experience, there needs to be at least one prevalent driver for social media.

She calls these the “4 Es of Social Media Strategy.”

There are already some great examples of companies that have zeroed in on one of these areas used it as a foundation for other drivers. For instance, J.C. Penney offers its Facebook fans—now over half a million strong—unique deals and discounts, clearly leveraging the social media channel to Engage a younger demographic of apparel customers. Earlier this year the retailer leaked its Oscar ads on Facebook before the show aired, mixing a little Entertain with a lot of Expose.
Indeed, many on-line retailers remind shoppers about shipping rates and return policies on their websites and through their blogs. But web strategist Jeremiah Owyang wrote this week about how Levi uses social media to Educate shoppers to “like” a product and to tell their friends about it.
Del Monte has leveraged the power of social networking with its “I Love My Dog” community, in which dog lovers can interact with the company and with each other. Del Monte gets 40 percent of its revenues through pet products (Snausages, anyone?). Who knew?

And that’s the point. Del Monte has gone from Expose as its primary driver—ensuring that pet owners ($2 billion a year strong) know about its various brands—and moved to Engage as its workaday model. The packaged goods company enlists its ready-made social community in surveys—using it to test marketing campaigns and get feedback on new product ideas—and occasionally moving over to Educate when it comes to product ingredients. In the meantime Del Monte is collecting information that can inform new campaigns and product ideas.
Over time your company’s social media strategy can incorporate each of the 4 Es, but there is usually a single prevailing need that will likely justify the initial effort, and provide the foundational platform and skill sets for subsequent social media activities. The key is to avoid making social media a “research project” or, as a Chief Marketing Officer pronounced it recently, “an intellectual exercise with no tangible benefits.” In a word, Ouch!

Jill also blogs at JillDyche.com.

HEALTHY BUSINESS STRATEGY
DRIVING REVENUE STREAMS

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST

>The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy

>

Jill Dyché in her Information Management Blog “The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy” contests that companies

are pretty vague about the drivers for the new “Social Media”initiative.

Apart from the usual platitudes of “getting closer to employees, partners, and customers via lower-cost channels” it turns out very few business leaders can answer my question about the desired outcome of social media analytics.
In our experience, there needs to be at least one prevalent driver for social media.

She calls these the “4 Es of Social Media Strategy.”

There are already some great examples of companies that have zeroed in on one of these areas used it as a foundation for other drivers. For instance, J.C. Penney offers its Facebook fans—now over half a million strong—unique deals and discounts, clearly leveraging the social media channel to Engage a younger demographic of apparel customers. Earlier this year the retailer leaked its Oscar ads on Facebook before the show aired, mixing a little Entertain with a lot of Expose.
Indeed, many on-line retailers remind shoppers about shipping rates and return policies on their websites and through their blogs. But web strategist Jeremiah Owyang wrote this week about how Levi uses social media to Educate shoppers to “like” a product and to tell their friends about it.
Del Monte has leveraged the power of social networking with its “I Love My Dog” community, in which dog lovers can interact with the company and with each other. Del Monte gets 40 percent of its revenues through pet products (Snausages, anyone?). Who knew?

And that’s the point. Del Monte has gone from Expose as its primary driver—ensuring that pet owners ($2 billion a year strong) know about its various brands—and moved to Engage as its workaday model. The packaged goods company enlists its ready-made social community in surveys—using it to test marketing campaigns and get feedback on new product ideas—and occasionally moving over to Educate when it comes to product ingredients. In the meantime Del Monte is collecting information that can inform new campaigns and product ideas.
Over time your company’s social media strategy can incorporate each of the 4 Es, but there is usually a single prevailing need that will likely justify the initial effort, and provide the foundational platform and skill sets for subsequent social media activities. The key is to avoid making social media a “research project” or, as a Chief Marketing Officer pronounced it recently, “an intellectual exercise with no tangible benefits.” In a word, Ouch!

Jill also blogs at JillDyche.com.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>A 4 Step Approach for Selecting the Right BI solution

>

Boris Evelson  in his Information Management Blog – Forrester Muse, titled “Use a Four-Step Approach to Select the Right BI Services Provider” contests that the fast-paced business environment often introduces new requirements, enhancements and updates before you’re even done with your first Business Intelligence implementation. 

Therefore, we typically recommend doing sufficient due diligence upfront when selecting a BI services provider — as you may be stuck with them for a long time.

We recommend the following key steps in your selection process:

1. Map BI project requirements to potential providers. Firms should use Forrester’s “BI Services Provider Short-Listing Tool” to create a shortlist of potential providers. With the tool you can input details about your geographic scope, technology needs, and the type of third-party support you need (i.e., consulting versus implementation versus hosting/outsourcing). The tool then outputs a list of potential providers that meet the criteria. For each potential fit, the tool also generates a provider profile summary that offers key details around practice size, characteristics, and areas of expertise.
2. Narrow your short-list based on additional needs and considerations. Beyond the capabilities of Forrester’s “BI Services Provider Short-Listing Tool,” firms must eliminate or add partners based on factors such as their current strategic suppliers list or past partner success or failure (and therefore image and reputation internally), plus references from peers. Similarly, some BI services buyers will have a preference for larger, global companies whereas others may want to consider more regional players and boutiques. Some firms will consider a single-provider strategy whereas others may engage multiple providers for different needs/phases.
3. Send RFI/RFP to potential candidates. Forrester’s “BI Service Provider Short-Listing Tool” is a basic starting point only. Most firms will need a more detailed RFI or RFP to uncover additional relevant details about project approach, proposed staffing model for a specific need, costs, or technical IP/accelerators/tools. Beyond key details about project approach and resources, BI services buyers will likely benefit from finding out details around provider strategy, such as SaaS and cloud capabilities or strategic partnerships.
4. Zero in on the finalist using Forrester’s BI consultants’ selection methodology. This is where the hard work starts, because from this point on the selection process becomes quite subjective. Dig deeper and understand your prospect’s strategic advisory capabilities. Also, check out their existing methodologies, reference architecture, and any relevant solution accelerators. Review their execution methodology, strength in data governance, and experience with next-generation BI technologies (such as Agile BI, self-service BI, and others).

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Boris also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/boris_evelson/

HEALTHY BUSINESS STRATEGY
DRIVING REVENUE STREAMS

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST

>A 4 Step Approach for Selecting the Right BI solution

>

Boris Evelson  in his Information Management Blog – Forrester Muse, titled “Use a Four-Step Approach to Select the Right BI Services Provider” contests that the fast-paced business environment often introduces new requirements, enhancements and updates before you’re even done with your first Business Intelligence implementation. 

Therefore, we typically recommend doing sufficient due diligence upfront when selecting a BI services provider — as you may be stuck with them for a long time.

We recommend the following key steps in your selection process:

1. Map BI project requirements to potential providers. Firms should use Forrester’s “BI Services Provider Short-Listing Tool” to create a shortlist of potential providers. With the tool you can input details about your geographic scope, technology needs, and the type of third-party support you need (i.e., consulting versus implementation versus hosting/outsourcing). The tool then outputs a list of potential providers that meet the criteria. For each potential fit, the tool also generates a provider profile summary that offers key details around practice size, characteristics, and areas of expertise.
2. Narrow your short-list based on additional needs and considerations. Beyond the capabilities of Forrester’s “BI Services Provider Short-Listing Tool,” firms must eliminate or add partners based on factors such as their current strategic suppliers list or past partner success or failure (and therefore image and reputation internally), plus references from peers. Similarly, some BI services buyers will have a preference for larger, global companies whereas others may want to consider more regional players and boutiques. Some firms will consider a single-provider strategy whereas others may engage multiple providers for different needs/phases.
3. Send RFI/RFP to potential candidates. Forrester’s “BI Service Provider Short-Listing Tool” is a basic starting point only. Most firms will need a more detailed RFI or RFP to uncover additional relevant details about project approach, proposed staffing model for a specific need, costs, or technical IP/accelerators/tools. Beyond key details about project approach and resources, BI services buyers will likely benefit from finding out details around provider strategy, such as SaaS and cloud capabilities or strategic partnerships.
4. Zero in on the finalist using Forrester’s BI consultants’ selection methodology. This is where the hard work starts, because from this point on the selection process becomes quite subjective. Dig deeper and understand your prospect’s strategic advisory capabilities. Also, check out their existing methodologies, reference architecture, and any relevant solution accelerators. Review their execution methodology, strength in data governance, and experience with next-generation BI technologies (such as Agile BI, self-service BI, and others).

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Boris also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/boris_evelson/

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>Social Business Intelligence: The Pipeline Dream

>

James Kobielus in his Information Management Blog “Social Business Intelligence: The Knowledge Management Connection” contests that Business intelligence (BI) has always had a “pipeline” orientation– known as “simplex” information transfer; in other words, a primary focus on the one-way flow of data, information and insights from “sources” (e.g., your customer relationship management systems, enterprise data warehouses, and subject-area data marts) to “consumers” (e.g., you).

However, many real-world intelligence flows are full-duplex, many-to-many, and person-to-person in orientation. This fundamental truth will continue to drive the spread of “social” architectures in core BI and advanced analytics…

Forrester has recently seen a growing interest in “social BI,” and in fact my colleagues and I recently social-blogged our collective thinking on this topic. Since then, we’ve seen vendor announcements, such as TIBCO Silver Spotfire, that invoke this new industry catchphrase. We’ve seen considerable discussion within the analyst community generally about this release and about what this and other vendors are doing in social BI. In this present post, I’ll be repeating some of the points from my inputs to the earlier Forrester blog, but am extending my observations to call out a broader emerging context.
For starters, social BI is no fad, nor is it an entirely new phenomenon. As I pointed out more than 3 years ago in the pages of Network World, many BI vendors had already added collaboration functionality such as instant messaging, human workflows, and shared analytic project libraries to their solutions. The trend has deepened since that time, as evidenced by the steady convergence of social networking into BI product architectures, as well as by the demonstration of shared discovery and visualization features in analytics initiatives such as IBM’s ManyEyes project. Yours truly alluded to what we now call social BI when I stated, way back then, that we should “expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs and wikis revolutionize the BI experience.”
As I noted in the recent Forrester multi-analyst blogpost, the move toward fully social BI implies all of that plus the following features, which, we predict, will find their way over the next few years into a wide range of commercial BI solutions:

• Social BI interactivity: We’ll see growing incorporation of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and kindred models of user-centric development, publishing, and subscription into the heart of the interactive BI user experience. Accelerating the trend toward pervasive BI, we’ll see more solutions that enable reports, dashboards, charts, and other BI views to be embedded in social media. You can regard today’s collaborative BI mashup offerings, discussed in my Forrester report from a year ago, as pointing the way toward this style of self-service team-based development, as do BI solutions from Lyzasoft, Tableau, JackBe, and other social-focused vendors.

• Social BI content marts: We can expect to see more BI solutions that support extension and/or replacement of traditional data marts with vast user-populated pools of complex, mashed-up, subject-oriented analytic content and applications. It’s not inconceivable that what I’m calling “social marts” will incorporate and build on content repositories that many enterprises have built on platforms from today’s enterprise content management (ECM) vendors.

• Social BI information integration: Users will be able to choose from a growing range of BI solutions that support discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis on growing streams of social media content, much of it coming in real-time from both public and private sources. Essentially, this is where advanced analytics features such as social media analytics, social media monitoring, and social network analysis, subject of another recent blogpost of mine, will converge into the growing social BI stack.

Pardon me for tooting my Nostradamus horn yet again, but I’d like to call attention to another long-range trend that I glimpsed then, and which the movement toward social BI shows is coming to pass. In 2007, I said “over the next several years, expect to see the BI, collaboration and knowledge management (KM) segments converge.” Some may have considered that a stretch, if not a bit far-fetched, considering that these are all large, well-established markets providing solutions that many enterprises, to this day, deploy in separate siloes. However, with the growing incorporation of social networking architectures in enterprise collaboration, content management, customer relationship management, and other tools, it’s only a matter of time before these market segments blur into a seamless cloud of social KM solutions.
As an enterprise IT professional, you’re probably watching all this with the usual combination of bated breath and healthy skepticism. Obviously, social BI is far from a mature marketplace. The industry is groping for a common approach toward which to evolve. BI vendors are still trying to get their collective heads around the vision of social BI. Just as important, vendors are, in their various ways, striving to differentiate through innovative new features that are aligned with the sorts of capabilities many of us enjoy through our personal dabblings in Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
As your current BI vendors roll such features into their products, you’ll probably start using them when you upgrade in the normal cycle. To the extent that you adopt small-scale BI solutions for particular business units, branches, or teams, those deployments might benefit from social BI that either supplements existing collaboration and KM tools — or eliminates the need to acquire those other, stovepipe solutions.
Social’s the thing, all right. Once you — and your BI vendor — are ready to move toward a more social-oriented capability, it would make sense to socialize those plans with some significant others inside your company. Start with the people responsible for your company’s collaboration, KM, and ECM initiatives.

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Jim also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/james_kobielus/.

HEALTHY BUSINESS STRATEGY
DRIVING REVENUE STREAMS

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST

>Social Business Intelligence: The Pipeline Dream

>

James Kobielus in his Information Management Blog “Social Business Intelligence: The Knowledge Management Connection” contests that Business intelligence (BI) has always had a “pipeline” orientation– known as “simplex” information transfer; in other words, a primary focus on the one-way flow of data, information and insights from “sources” (e.g., your customer relationship management systems, enterprise data warehouses, and subject-area data marts) to “consumers” (e.g., you).

However, many real-world intelligence flows are full-duplex, many-to-many, and person-to-person in orientation. This fundamental truth will continue to drive the spread of “social” architectures in core BI and advanced analytics…

Forrester has recently seen a growing interest in “social BI,” and in fact my colleagues and I recently social-blogged our collective thinking on this topic. Since then, we’ve seen vendor announcements, such as TIBCO Silver Spotfire, that invoke this new industry catchphrase. We’ve seen considerable discussion within the analyst community generally about this release and about what this and other vendors are doing in social BI. In this present post, I’ll be repeating some of the points from my inputs to the earlier Forrester blog, but am extending my observations to call out a broader emerging context.
For starters, social BI is no fad, nor is it an entirely new phenomenon. As I pointed out more than 3 years ago in the pages of Network World, many BI vendors had already added collaboration functionality such as instant messaging, human workflows, and shared analytic project libraries to their solutions. The trend has deepened since that time, as evidenced by the steady convergence of social networking into BI product architectures, as well as by the demonstration of shared discovery and visualization features in analytics initiatives such as IBM’s ManyEyes project. Yours truly alluded to what we now call social BI when I stated, way back then, that we should “expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs and wikis revolutionize the BI experience.”
As I noted in the recent Forrester multi-analyst blogpost, the move toward fully social BI implies all of that plus the following features, which, we predict, will find their way over the next few years into a wide range of commercial BI solutions:

• Social BI interactivity: We’ll see growing incorporation of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and kindred models of user-centric development, publishing, and subscription into the heart of the interactive BI user experience. Accelerating the trend toward pervasive BI, we’ll see more solutions that enable reports, dashboards, charts, and other BI views to be embedded in social media. You can regard today’s collaborative BI mashup offerings, discussed in my Forrester report from a year ago, as pointing the way toward this style of self-service team-based development, as do BI solutions from Lyzasoft, Tableau, JackBe, and other social-focused vendors.

• Social BI content marts: We can expect to see more BI solutions that support extension and/or replacement of traditional data marts with vast user-populated pools of complex, mashed-up, subject-oriented analytic content and applications. It’s not inconceivable that what I’m calling “social marts” will incorporate and build on content repositories that many enterprises have built on platforms from today’s enterprise content management (ECM) vendors.

• Social BI information integration: Users will be able to choose from a growing range of BI solutions that support discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis on growing streams of social media content, much of it coming in real-time from both public and private sources. Essentially, this is where advanced analytics features such as social media analytics, social media monitoring, and social network analysis, subject of another recent blogpost of mine, will converge into the growing social BI stack.

Pardon me for tooting my Nostradamus horn yet again, but I’d like to call attention to another long-range trend that I glimpsed then, and which the movement toward social BI shows is coming to pass. In 2007, I said “over the next several years, expect to see the BI, collaboration and knowledge management (KM) segments converge.” Some may have considered that a stretch, if not a bit far-fetched, considering that these are all large, well-established markets providing solutions that many enterprises, to this day, deploy in separate siloes. However, with the growing incorporation of social networking architectures in enterprise collaboration, content management, customer relationship management, and other tools, it’s only a matter of time before these market segments blur into a seamless cloud of social KM solutions.
As an enterprise IT professional, you’re probably watching all this with the usual combination of bated breath and healthy skepticism. Obviously, social BI is far from a mature marketplace. The industry is groping for a common approach toward which to evolve. BI vendors are still trying to get their collective heads around the vision of social BI. Just as important, vendors are, in their various ways, striving to differentiate through innovative new features that are aligned with the sorts of capabilities many of us enjoy through our personal dabblings in Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
As your current BI vendors roll such features into their products, you’ll probably start using them when you upgrade in the normal cycle. To the extent that you adopt small-scale BI solutions for particular business units, branches, or teams, those deployments might benefit from social BI that either supplements existing collaboration and KM tools — or eliminates the need to acquire those other, stovepipe solutions.
Social’s the thing, all right. Once you — and your BI vendor — are ready to move toward a more social-oriented capability, it would make sense to socialize those plans with some significant others inside your company. Start with the people responsible for your company’s collaboration, KM, and ECM initiatives.

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Jim also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/james_kobielus/.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>Analytics in Retail

>

Mark A. Smith in his  Information Management Blog titled “Analytics in Retail: An Operational and Financial Mandate”contests that for

every role in a retail organization, marketing, selling and serving customers are critical  for converting shoppers to profitable customers. functions.  As volumes and sources of data continue to expand, the retail industry is going through a transformation in using all forms of data to advance its efforts. And Analytics in Retail, can help determine the best actions to optimize future efforts in the most cost-effective manner.

I have seen retailers spend enormous amounts of time on marketing their products through pricing and promotion, but most spend far less time to understand if the right customers are being marketed to or if the proximity and travel patterns of consumers to retail locations are correlated to their propensity to spend. Retailers are just starting to realize that understanding and influencing customer conversations on the Internet in social media channels is a necessity and that it requires a new type of analytics that can process text and phrases that reveal consumer sentiment and opinions of their brands. Also the advancement of consumer and market analytics from organizations like IRI and Nielsen continue to play a key role in the knowledge how to optimize brand and categories for retailing. Being savvy about this in the front office requires a team of people working closely together to optimize the marketing-to-sale process in hopes of containing costs and maximizing volume at the right price whether in a retail location or online.
The front office is not the only place where retailers need advanced analytics. They are valuable in managing the movement of goods and services, from the demand plan and forecasts through the management of external suppliers to fulfillment and payment. These days managing that process needs analytics that can be applied not only daily and weekly but also by the minute and hour. Of course the fluid set of processes in manufacturing and logistics have long used analytics but usually piecemeal and not across the entire process. Comfortable with their own set of unique processes, retailers have been reluctant to embrace business process management; now the innovative ones have begun to use business events in a synchronized manner with complex event processing (CEP) to correlate and analyze activities along the demand and supply chain in retail stores to the back office operations.
Another vital need is financial management that engages costing and profitability at every level, from product and category to location and customer, to determine whether retailing practices are effective. In many organizations the finance department has not played a leadership role in working with operations and marketing to get mutual agreement on the metrics and analytics needed to support financial goals. This is beginning to change. This also requires a team effort in which finance collaborates with analysts. This analytics has to be applied to the workforce to reduce employee churn, train people effectively and retain the most productive. Advances in workforce analytics have made it easier to look at these processes. Applied properly, analytics can ensure that the right level of investment is made to contain costs through learning, establish flexible work hours and design incentives to keep the workforce productive and contributing to profitability. No matter if you are trying to use historical or predictive analytics the opportunity to improve is everywhere in retail organizations.
It is important to remember that you cannot take only a general or industry specific approach to improving retail analytics; you need to focus on each specific line of business and its needs, which vary from the front office and operations to finance and the workforce. I advise you to be careful in selecting tools and vendors, as many claim to provide the analytics you need for your whole retail industry but only address a handful of activities in their applications. You will have to prioritize what lines of business and processes you most want to improve; you’ll consider industry-specific solutions but also examine technology that can be used across industries. Retailers will find they can learn a lot at looking at the advances in other industries, especially the manufacturers that source their goods. Just as important is to establish the right level of competencies in your analyst teams along with the right technology tools. Investing in your IT organization so it can adapt and grow with new analytic technologies is also necessary. These are examples of the critical areas that retailers need to examine to become more savvy with analytics and drive stronger business results.

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Mark also blogs at VentanaResearch.com/blog.

HEALTHY BUSINESS STRATEGY
DRIVING REVENUE STREAMS

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST

>Analytics in Retail

>

Mark A. Smith in his  Information Management Blog titled “Analytics in Retail: An Operational and Financial Mandate”contests that for

every role in a retail organization, marketing, selling and serving customers are critical  for converting shoppers to profitable customers. functions.  As volumes and sources of data continue to expand, the retail industry is going through a transformation in using all forms of data to advance its efforts. And Analytics in Retail, can help determine the best actions to optimize future efforts in the most cost-effective manner.

I have seen retailers spend enormous amounts of time on marketing their products through pricing and promotion, but most spend far less time to understand if the right customers are being marketed to or if the proximity and travel patterns of consumers to retail locations are correlated to their propensity to spend. Retailers are just starting to realize that understanding and influencing customer conversations on the Internet in social media channels is a necessity and that it requires a new type of analytics that can process text and phrases that reveal consumer sentiment and opinions of their brands. Also the advancement of consumer and market analytics from organizations like IRI and Nielsen continue to play a key role in the knowledge how to optimize brand and categories for retailing. Being savvy about this in the front office requires a team of people working closely together to optimize the marketing-to-sale process in hopes of containing costs and maximizing volume at the right price whether in a retail location or online.
The front office is not the only place where retailers need advanced analytics. They are valuable in managing the movement of goods and services, from the demand plan and forecasts through the management of external suppliers to fulfillment and payment. These days managing that process needs analytics that can be applied not only daily and weekly but also by the minute and hour. Of course the fluid set of processes in manufacturing and logistics have long used analytics but usually piecemeal and not across the entire process. Comfortable with their own set of unique processes, retailers have been reluctant to embrace business process management; now the innovative ones have begun to use business events in a synchronized manner with complex event processing (CEP) to correlate and analyze activities along the demand and supply chain in retail stores to the back office operations.
Another vital need is financial management that engages costing and profitability at every level, from product and category to location and customer, to determine whether retailing practices are effective. In many organizations the finance department has not played a leadership role in working with operations and marketing to get mutual agreement on the metrics and analytics needed to support financial goals. This is beginning to change. This also requires a team effort in which finance collaborates with analysts. This analytics has to be applied to the workforce to reduce employee churn, train people effectively and retain the most productive. Advances in workforce analytics have made it easier to look at these processes. Applied properly, analytics can ensure that the right level of investment is made to contain costs through learning, establish flexible work hours and design incentives to keep the workforce productive and contributing to profitability. No matter if you are trying to use historical or predictive analytics the opportunity to improve is everywhere in retail organizations.
It is important to remember that you cannot take only a general or industry specific approach to improving retail analytics; you need to focus on each specific line of business and its needs, which vary from the front office and operations to finance and the workforce. I advise you to be careful in selecting tools and vendors, as many claim to provide the analytics you need for your whole retail industry but only address a handful of activities in their applications. You will have to prioritize what lines of business and processes you most want to improve; you’ll consider industry-specific solutions but also examine technology that can be used across industries. Retailers will find they can learn a lot at looking at the advances in other industries, especially the manufacturers that source their goods. Just as important is to establish the right level of competencies in your analyst teams along with the right technology tools. Investing in your IT organization so it can adapt and grow with new analytic technologies is also necessary. These are examples of the critical areas that retailers need to examine to become more savvy with analytics and drive stronger business results.

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Mark also blogs at VentanaResearch.com/blog.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>Why Consumer Goods Companies Need Analytics to Compete?

>

Mark A. Smith in his Information Management Blog titled “Consumer Goods Companies Need Analytics to Compete” contests that given the cutthroat competitive landscape among consumer goods manufacturers, from food and beverage to electronics and automotives, capturing the minds and wallet share of customers, by reaching out to them with the right product and right price is no easy task.

Optimizing business efforts from manufacturing to product and throughout the supply chain to customers requires a comprehensive set of tasks that cannot be done without insights on what has happened in the past and where current activities are going. Those event-driven and demand-driven insights can come through analytics that assess the small but important details of pricing, trade promotions and processes in the supply chain to keep retailers satisfied with inventory levels.

Retailers themselves are learning how to use analytics, as I recently pointed out (See: “Analytics in Retail: An Operational and Financial Mandate“); and to keep up, manufacturers must be smarter in their sales teams and the people who manage the sales and operational plans that commit capital and resources of the organization. In addition, Finance is not just along for the ride any more as it looks to get more engaged in the effectiveness of spending and balancing financial resources to meet the margin targets for the quarter. This can be accomplished through costing and profitability analytics that examine product and marketing investments across the business.
These days it is insufficient to apply analytics only to data representing historical activities; also needed is predictive analytics based on models and variables that can provide forward-looking projections of what will likely happen based on the planned activities. Organizations need to know how much and when to invest in marketing and product activities where pricing and promotion can generate only limited benefits in this busy marketplace of ever more competitors and changing economic conditions. All these demands are driving many consumer goods manufacturers to build new competencies in business analyst teams and seek tools and technology to apply analytics most effectively. Analysts then can cross lines of business to work more closely together than just focusing on their individual department’s functions.
It’s clear from all this activity that the consumer goods industry is in flux, forced to mature in its processes and utilize technology to its fullest. To optimize consumer brand recognition and profitability, companies must re-examine their current analytic processes and use data to determine if there are faster, better and, yes, cheaper methods to meet never-ending demands from a variety of business areas.
Of course any organization may need to prioritize where you focus improvements in the lines of business, but I advise you to consider that industry-specific solutions from technology providers are likely to solve only some of your needs. Getting away from the silos of spreadsheets and the inefficiency of electronic mail is a must; you want to have an analytic process that is much like your manufacturing process. Working collaboratively across business and IT is one big step in the right direction.

Mark also blogs at VentanaResearch.com/blog.

HEALTHY BUSINESS STRATEGY
DRIVING REVENUE STREAMS

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST

>Why Consumer Goods Companies Need Analytics to Compete?

>

Mark A. Smith in his Information Management Blog titled “Consumer Goods Companies Need Analytics to Compete” contests that given the cutthroat competitive landscape among consumer goods manufacturers, from food and beverage to electronics and automotives, capturing the minds and wallet share of customers, by reaching out to them with the right product and right price is no easy task.

Optimizing business efforts from manufacturing to product and throughout the supply chain to customers requires a comprehensive set of tasks that cannot be done without insights on what has happened in the past and where current activities are going. Those event-driven and demand-driven insights can come through analytics that assess the small but important details of pricing, trade promotions and processes in the supply chain to keep retailers satisfied with inventory levels.

Retailers themselves are learning how to use analytics, as I recently pointed out (See: “Analytics in Retail: An Operational and Financial Mandate“); and to keep up, manufacturers must be smarter in their sales teams and the people who manage the sales and operational plans that commit capital and resources of the organization. In addition, Finance is not just along for the ride any more as it looks to get more engaged in the effectiveness of spending and balancing financial resources to meet the margin targets for the quarter. This can be accomplished through costing and profitability analytics that examine product and marketing investments across the business.
These days it is insufficient to apply analytics only to data representing historical activities; also needed is predictive analytics based on models and variables that can provide forward-looking projections of what will likely happen based on the planned activities. Organizations need to know how much and when to invest in marketing and product activities where pricing and promotion can generate only limited benefits in this busy marketplace of ever more competitors and changing economic conditions. All these demands are driving many consumer goods manufacturers to build new competencies in business analyst teams and seek tools and technology to apply analytics most effectively. Analysts then can cross lines of business to work more closely together than just focusing on their individual department’s functions.
It’s clear from all this activity that the consumer goods industry is in flux, forced to mature in its processes and utilize technology to its fullest. To optimize consumer brand recognition and profitability, companies must re-examine their current analytic processes and use data to determine if there are faster, better and, yes, cheaper methods to meet never-ending demands from a variety of business areas.
Of course any organization may need to prioritize where you focus improvements in the lines of business, but I advise you to consider that industry-specific solutions from technology providers are likely to solve only some of your needs. Getting away from the silos of spreadsheets and the inefficiency of electronic mail is a must; you want to have an analytic process that is much like your manufacturing process. Working collaboratively across business and IT is one big step in the right direction.

Mark also blogs at VentanaResearch.com/blog.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!