In these trying times, many people find themselves with extra time to focus on self-improvement—reading books, exercising more, and learning new skills. There are also the difficulties that people deal with such as feeling out of touch with friends and loved ones. Many have started using modern technology like Zoom, Facetime, and other virtual-meeting applications to keep up to date with those who are important in their lives.
These same concepts can be applied to your business as employees work remotely and information that used to be a few steps away now feels out of reach. To deal with this situation, many businesses adopt virtual meetings to maintain face-to-face interactions among co-workers. While these meetings are great, they cannot replace the feel of in-person interactions.
Many managers can manage by feel, but what happens when they are isolated from employees? They may miss out on key information or overlook things that they would normally notice during in-person meetings.
To solve this challenge, Business Intelligence (BI) can be used to gain finger-tip access to the full scope of information about your business and how employees are interacting with each other as well as with customers. By leveraging BI, you can increase the ROI of your ERP and CRM platforms while keeping everyone on the same page with access to one source of truth as to what’s going on with customers and their orders.
You can also use this work-from-home time as a motivator to automate processes that you previously handled manually when people were still at the office. This will improve workforce efficiency, not only now but also in the future when everyone returns to the office.
This is where Analytics-as-a-Service can help. These solutions bundle leading BI platforms with preconfigured yet customizable industry dashboards and data models. By working with knowledgeable BI experts and these predeveloped solutions, you can accelerate your deployment and leverage best-practice reports created from the shared knowledge pool of previous BI deployments by companies similar to yours.
While you will still require some customization, starting with a pre-built solution will help you cut down on some of that cost. And the benefits you gain—helping employees feel more connected as they work from home and automating manual processes to improve their efficiency—will be well worth the effort.
For help in selecting the right BI solution for your company and determining whether it makes sense to deploy in the cloud or on-premises, ATX is here to assist.
Author: Ian Netland, ATX Advisory Services
