Services and Programs

Strat-Wise offers a variety of programs designed to provide your company with the Strategic Knowledge System™ you need to grow your businesses profitably.  

 

1. Strategic Analysis Toolbox™. - Our analytic tools are custom designed to represent your business model and reflect the competitive landscape you face.  This integrated information tool provides your company with a competitive advantage by ensuring a 360° view of the market-business-profit reality—the critical information needed to make the right decisions fast, time and time again. 
2. Training. - We provide the training necessary to maximize the effectiveness of your Strategic Analysis Toolbox^TM and ensure they are continuously used by your organization, in order to increase profitability by:

•  Increasing Sales Throughput
•  Reducing Inventory and other Working Capital Investments
•  Decreasing Operating Expenses

3.  Analysis and Maintenance. - Even though we provide training for your group to perform their own business analysis and market intelligence updates, we can manage the process for clients that prefer outsourcing this task.

 
 1.  Strategic Analysis Tools

The following tool set provides a clear strategic diagnostic overview of your business, market and profitability.

1.1)      Interactive Sales & Profitability Tracker – You can evaluate and compare progress on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.  It fully integrates your actual business results with strategic market intelligence dimensions like business unit, customer location and market segmentation.
Sales marketing and senior management will benefit from the business analysis capability  with no intervention of financial analysts or IT support.  They can instantly diagnose the causes for lagging business results and find accurate answers to complex questions such as: 

• Where are we more profitable: strategic customers, key customers or distributors?
• Why? Is it due to pricing, volume or product mix?
• What is our current market share in a particular business unit in Europe?
• Are our specialty brands more profitable than the commodity ones? Why?
• Are our new products more profitable than the old ones? How much? Why?
• Who are the top 5% of my customers that generate 50% of profits? Why?
• Who are the customers and what are the products that drain our profits? Why?
• How much is our profit by customer growing versus last year?  And versus budget?  

  1.2) Dealer, Distributor, Agent Tracker - you can compare progress of how your distribution partners sell to their customers and monitor their profitability on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.  It fully integrates their actual business results with your strategic market intelligence dimensions like business unit customer and market segmentation.
Sales marketing and senior management will benefit from the fast business analysis capability by finding out the causes for your partners’ business results instantly with no intervention of financial analysts or IT support.  They will be able to find accurate answers in seconds to complex questions like the following: 

• What are our most profitable channels?
• Who do our distributors, agents and dealers sell to?
• In what markets / segments / sub segments?
• What is their mark-up? / Profitability?
• What is their new versus old product ratio?
• Who are their most profitable customers?  

1.3) Business Plan Viewer - Your team can view the details of your business plan by understanding how much of each product is expected to be sold to each customer in each market during the future plan year.  This is extremely useful to eliminate surprises.  This provides sales and marketing teams plain with a clear picture of the expectations and full accountability for results.  They will be able to find accurate answers in seconds to complex questions like the following:

• How much of each product is Sales-rep X supposed to sell to each of his customers in June of next year?
• What is the profit margin by customer expected to be?
• What Revenue and Profit do we expect to generate next year in a particular market segment in France?  

1.4) Competitive Opportunity Tracker - Your marketing and sales teams can constantly update and monitor your own and competitors’ market share.  They can also evaluate your company’s growth opportunities as well as the pieces of business that are at risk due to competitive threats.  Using either your own CRM and ERP data or other data feeds, this tool provides your team a complete interactive overview of the markets in which you operate and allows you to clearly visualize the pieces of business your competitors enjoy at each one of your customers.  They will be able to find accurate answers in seconds to complex questions like the following:

• What does our opportunity pipeline look like?
• Which pieces of business are under competitive threat? (By product, competitor and customer location, in units and dollars)
• What is each of our competitors’ current market share?
• What is our share of the business at customer B?   

1.5) Interactive Market Study Viewer - Have you ever performed market research or purchased a multi-client market study that has thousands of pages and tables that are not precisely formatted in the way you need for your business.  We can integrate them into an easy to use, interactive market intelligence tool to allow your team to explore the market data fast and make comparisons with your own sales and profitability data in the exact way you need it. 

2. Training Programs

2.1) Strategic Analysis Toolbox™. Although our tools are designed to be intuitive and extremely user friendly, we provide the necessary training in order to fully exploit their potential in your business. Attendees will learn how to perform strategic analysis and find the root causes for performance, instantly and interactively. This is a six hour hands-on training session, three hours in the morning, lunch break and three hours in the afternoon. This computer classroom style session is designed to find the answers to complex questions specifically related to your business. It includes practical exercises to perform diagnostics of your business.

2.2) 80/20 Analysis and Strategy. At first glance, you might assume that 50% of your profits come from 50% of your customers. This couldn’t be any further from reality. Over a century ago Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 80% of the reward was produced by 20% of the effort. While the 80/20 rule is widely known, companies seldom understand how to exploit it to gain productivity and increase profitability. By applying it, we can immediately identify those products, customers, sales-reps, markets, segments, businesses or regions that drain cash, visualize the reasons for poor performance and take corrective actions. More importantly, we can also find segments that are extraordinarily profitable, understand the reasons behind profitability and design new products, services or training programs to replicate their profitability.

The implementation of 80/20 Analysis and Strategy improves profitability. It brings a clear picture of how the 80/20 principle impacts profits, R&D success rates, customers, products, distributors and inventory levels. In addition, 80/20 is used effectively to perform product and customer portfolio management, SKU rationalization and inventory reduction on an ongoing basis.

Through our 80/20 training program we will show your team how to exploit the Strategic Analysis Toolbox^TM to impact the bottom line. This program covers how to use the 80/20 Principle to find out which products or customers drain your company’s cash and how to stop the bleeding through product and customer portfolio management. Additionally, it covers how to determine which products, customers, regions, distributors, sales representatives, projects and markets are really strategic for your company, uncover why they are profitable and what to do to replicate their profitability.
We provide 80/20 Analysis training to optimize profitability in the following areas:

2.2.1) Eliminating Underperforming Products – Your team will very quickly identify the unprofitable products and have all the elements to develop an individual action plan for each of the low profit SKUs, taking into consideration each particular customer risk. The objective is to simplify and reduce the size of the product line with no loss of revenue. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.2) Optimizing Customer Portfolio – Your sales and marketing folks will be able to understand profitability by customer group and account location, define customer segmentation and develop an action plan to increase profitability of customers and account locations that are not satisfactory. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.3) Optimizing Agent, Distributor and Dealer – Your Sales and Marketing teams will be able to evaluate profitability by distribution partner, understand underlining reasons for performance and develop an action plan to increase the profit of those partners that are not delivering. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.4) Increasing New Product Effectiveness – Are your new products delivering the expected results? Your team will visualize the profitability of new products versus old ones and identify the stars and dogs. Understanding the reasons for performance will help you R&D and Engineering teams developing the next generation of products. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.5) Optimizing Sales Force Profitability – Who are the top 5% of your sales force that deliver 50% of your total profit? Why are the top 5% 100 times more profitable than the rest of the team? Finding this out would be useful to develop training programs to bring everyone’s sales throughput up to speed. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.6) Business and Market Segment Profitability Metrics – Your team will be able to find and compare the profitability of each market segment and sub-segment in which you operate in seconds, not days or weeks. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.7) 80/20 Inventory Matrix/ Inventory Reduction/ Inventory-Dollar-Days TOC Metrics – Identify the star and dog SKU’S in your inventory instantly. Create a matrix that will help your team set effective inventory reduction strategies while maintaining targeted customer service levels. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.8) Critical Raw Material Profitability – Find a Quick way to maximize the profitability of scarce or critical raw materials. Visualize the products and customers that yield maximum amount of sales throughput per unit of constrained resource. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.9) Theory of Constraints Metrics – This is an effective way to align personnel performance targets with department goals and company profitability objectives. This is normally a two hour training session.

3. Analysis and Maintenance

Even though we provide training for your teams to perform their own business analysis and market intelligence updates, we can manage the process for clients that prefer outsourcing this task.

Where do you go from here?

If you have read this far, you might be wondering whether this program could work for your company or not. One way to help answering that question is our complimentary Strategic Analytics Session.

During the session we’ll explore the challenges you and your team face, the kind of results you’d like to see, and whether this program will be of help or not. Even if the program isn’t a fit, you and your team will leave the conversation with more clarity about your issues and excited about what’s possible for the future.

If this introductory session is something you could see your team doing, the process starts with a brief, no-obligation call to get acquainted, discuss your situation, and determine who needs to be involved. And rest assured. We’ll never push you to make a decision or pressure you in any way - that’s simply not how we work.

The initial conversation will take about one hour and can be done ideally in person, or by phone. Click here to arrange a time to have a strategy session and I will be in contact with you within the next 24 hours.

Looking forward to seeing how we can help.


Warmest Regards

Bill Cabiro

Managing Director
Strat-Wise Consulting

 

Analytics Driven Profitability Program

How can you improve profitability when your commercial teams are drowning in oceans of data but thirsty for the strategic information they need to grow the business?

Increasing profitability is hard even for the most talented and hardworking commercial and technical teams:

Customers demand better products at lower prices, global competitors are becoming more aggressive while costs continue to rise, new technologies threaten to change your industry and corporate data continues to grow at a whopping 41% annual rate⁽¹⁾ making it more and more difficult to get answers about what's really happening.

Your Strategic Marketing should be headlights of the business constantly anticipating future trends and exploiting them in a manner that increases market share, profit and cash flow.  Their focus needs to be mostly outside and in the future but your corporate data is internal and in the past.

Research shows that organizations with strong analytics outperform the S&P 500 on average by 64%.⁽²⁾  You’d like to be in that group, but your IT investment is designed to support Accounting, Finance and Operations instead of enabling the strategic activities you need to fuel growth.

As a leader you’d like your organization to be more market driven and customer focused.  Turning data into Strategic Knowledge becomes a competitive advantage as anyone in your team can understand market trends and customer needs before and better than your competition.  However, this can be a challenge because your IT tends to be technology driven, doesn’t speak the same language your commercial folks do and is tied up with technical priorities, internal policies or governance constraints.

(1)  Aberdeen Group

(2)  Harvard business Review: Analytics and the Bottom Line – September 23, 2010

Why it’s so hard to develop a strong Strategic Analytic Capability for growing your business.

Marketing, Sales and R&D teams often struggle to increase profitability as they can’t always clearly visualize the connection between strategic objectives and tactical execution.

It takes days to answer simple questions about market share, profitability or growth of a particular segment, product line, customer or competitor.  Analysts go through an inefficient manual process where they run queries, export them to spreadsheets, manually cleanse data errors, add look-ups from external data sources, and finally create pivot tables to find the answers.  Even worse, they have to go through the entire process over and over again every time they need a progress update, either the following week or at month-end, quarter-end or year-end for each one of the business units and markets they support.  Not only is this inefficient but using analysts’ personal assumptions to fix data actually makes matters worse. You end up with multiple data silos and different versions of the truth that further complicate and slow down the decision making process.

People spend important meetings’ time arguing whose data is correct instead of focusing on the critical issues that drive growth.  The numbers generated by Finance do not agree with the analysis performed by Marketing or the explanations provided by Sales.  They need a single version of the truth, but different folks run different queries, made different data cleansing assumptions and customized their spreadsheets based on different metrics.  The result: unnecessary long delays to take the necessary actions.

It is nearly impossible to visualize the profitability of global products or develop a Key Account Strategy for global customers because different branches, subsidiaries and business units use disparate and incompatible legacy systems.  They classify business units, markets, segments, customers and product lines differently.  You know there has to be a better way to visualize this information so the sum of the country views makes up the regional views and their integration, in turn results in the global view – instantly.

As a result people don’t have a clear picture of your business:

Commercial teams cannot easily spot the 40% of your customers that drain cash nor understand the causes.  Chances are the top 5% of your customers generates 50% of your profits while the bottom 40% of your customers generates almost no profit at all.  Your teams need to know at any time of the month, quarter or year exactly which customers fall in each category, and understand the reasons, in order to drive the business towards a higher, more balanced and stable bottom line.

You risk losing a major customer because your organization gives the same priority to a five thousand dollar customer as a fifty million dollar one.  Outside the commercial areas, employees cannot recognize your strategic customers — much less understand why you deem them so.

Sales people seek volume at the expense of profit. Most don’t have a clue about how profitable their customers are across their territories.  They have never seen a P&L of their own territories showing which customers and products generate profits and which ones drain cash.  If you pay them a commission, shouldn’t it be based on profitable growth and not on volume or revenue?

How can you drive new product profitability if you cannot monitor product innovation metrics quickly and regularly?  Your organization invests significantly in R&D, product design and engineering.  However, it’s always difficult to measure the year-to-year vitality index or profitability progress of new products and understand if the differentiation-to-commodity ratio is moving in the right direction.

Your team cannot clearly visualize the business opportunity pipeline.  Nobody knows whether next year’s growth will be organic, if it will come from new markets or from aggressively taking market share from your competitors and at what price.

What you really hope to accomplish instead…

Your commercial teams consistently satisfy customers’ needs faster and better than the competition.  This creates customer value, while giving you a profitable competitive advantage.  Accurate analytics driven decision making aligns tactical actions with the strategic direction necessary to grow your business:

Strategic teams save precious time by quickly finding the answers they need to run the business.  They finally share a single version of the truth where analyses run by Finance are in full agreement with those run by Marketing and Sales with no need to perform time consuming data manipulation using multiple spreadsheets.

Global, regional and local business performance views and metrics are consistent and fully integrated.  It’s important to see how your individual customers and products make up the 30 thousand feet view of your business.  It’s also easy to visualize global metrics, understand the impact and profitability of global products or develop a Key Account Strategy for global customers—even if different companies, subsidiaries and business units use disparate or incompatible legacy systems.

Everyone can see which 5% of your customers generate 50% of your profits and why.  They can also visualize who are in the bottom 40% of your customers that generate no profit at all.  They can monitor this at any time of the month, quarter or year, and understand the causes, in order to drive the profitability distribution towards a higher, more balanced and stable bottom line.

Your organization monitors Product Innovation Metrics quickly and regularly.  Everyone can measure the year-to-year, or even the quarter-to-quarter profitability progress of new products, their vitality index and the differentiation ratio of every product line, business unit or market segment.

Your entire team shares a real time view of the business opportunities in your pipeline.  They can instantly quantify the impact and probability of success for new business, as well as the risk associated with those pieces of business under competitive threat while visualizing your competitor’s market share in different regions and segments.

Strategic Customers enjoy the priority service level they deserve.  Everyone in your organization - not just Sales or Marketing - recognizes your Strategic Customers and Key Account locations and treats them accordingly.  Employees no longer give the same priority to a five thousand dollar customer as a 50 million dollar one.

Sales people increase their profitability by becoming “General Managers” of their territories.  They know how to generate profit in their territories and never again chase unprofitable volume.  They can see a profit & loss statement of their territories anytime and run P&Ls for each individual customer parent and branch location, showing the products generating profits, the ones draining cash and more importantly, understanding their causes in order to manage for profitable growth.

If you’re not seeing these kinds of results, you’re not alone.  Very few companies have mastered the transformation of their data into Strategic Knowledge to become true analytic competitors ⁽³⁾.

You cannot achieve this kind of performance by hanging onto traditional approaches that keep IT and Strategic Teams disconnected or by trying to find the magic software to do the trick.  But there is a way to make this happen in your business...

The Solution?  The Analytics Driven Profitability Program

Analytics Driven Profitability is designed to help you gain a significant competitive advantage.  It’s a customized service that integrates your external market intelligence with your internal business data to be used a strategic asset to grow the business.  Depending on the business size, data quality and accessibility it typically takes three to six months to complete.

We build a Strategic Analytics Toolbox that captures your business model, market structure and competitive landscape to give your team the information it needs to find accurate answers through an intuitive and easy to use representation of your markets, business and profitability engine—one that they’ll be excited about using to grow your business.

We provide extensive training so your team learns to perform strategic and competitive analysis on the fly.  We enable your team to find accurate answers through an intuitive and easy to use representation of your business.  Everyone in your commercial team will be able to find answers to complex questions quickly by themselves without having to depend on IT analysts, BI experts or super-users to interface with complex systems.

Our objective is NOT to revamp or replace your entire data warehouse, data marts or enterprise systems.  Based on what you already have, we create a Strategic Analysis Module where your commercial teams can visualize the relationship between Market, Business and Profit and use that information to become more competitive.

(3) Competing on Analytics – The Science of Winning - Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris  

What makes the Analytics Driven Profitability Program unique?

The Analytics Driven Profit Program is designed to provide a strong analytic advantage to your Marketing, Sales, R&D and Strategic Business teams so they can effectively use the business data they already have to beat the competition and increase market share, revenue and profit.

Our program transforms raw data into the relevant, accurate and useable Strategic Knowledge your commercial team needs to grow the business.  The program focuses on the use of Business Analytics as a competitive advantage to obtain sustainable and profitable growth.

We go beyond dashboards.  We provide your entire team the capability of performing strategic and competitive analysis intuitively on the fly.

We’re always available for you and your team.  While it sometimes means a client will have to wait before we can start a new engagement, we limit ourselves to starting one new Analytics Driven Profit Program per quarter so that each client gets the individual attention they need.

Our program removes the barriers that constrain analysis driven growth by providing:

• Data Quality:  Our program brings strategic meaning to your data.  We cleanse, organize and structure your business data and make it compatible with your market and competitive intelligence.

• Self-Serve Approach:  We use tools that stimulate analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.  This ensures that everyone can effectively obtain the answers intuitively without the intervention of IT, experts or analysts.  This saves the organization a lot of time and effort and enables the decision making process to take place at the speed of thought.

• Alignment of strategic objectives with tactical execution:  This is necessary to adjust your action plans as soon as results start to deviate from their targets.

Key benefits of the Analytics Driven Profitability Program

After completing our program you’ll have:

A strategic organization that shares the same integrated view of the current facts about your business, regions, market segmentation, product and customer profitability, best opportunities for growth, product innovation trends, R&D projects and competitors’ activities; And uses it to outsmart your competitors through fast, effective and profitable decisions.

A motivated strategic team where business leaders, marketing, product managers, sales and R&D folks concentrate on creating profitable customer value instead of wasting time manipulating inconsistent data from multiple silos.

Clarity and Simplicity.  You won’t have to rely on IT analysts, system experts or super-users to interface with complex systems.  Everyone in your commercial team will be able to find the correct answers right away.

Transparency and Accountability. While that may make some folks uncomfortable at the beginning, it’s crucial that everyone is clear about who is accountable for what and how actions are connected to profit generation.

What’s included in the program

There are seven parts to the Analytics Driven Profitability Program:

Phase 1 – Planning and Objectives.  We talk with your key people to understand your market structure, business model, product lines and the issues you face in the different business units.  Then we discuss the objectives underlying your strategic metrics and customize them to fit your needs and company culture.

Phase 2 - Data Assessment.  We explore your business intelligence, ERP, Data Warehouse and CRM systems to determine the type and semantic quality of the data available.  We may need to work closely with your IT folks if the semantic aspects of the data are not in line with the needs of your commercial teams.

Phase 3 – Data Structuring.  Working closely with your strategic and commercial teams.  we cleanse, organize and structure your marketing knowledge base to reflect accurately markets, segments, customer and competitive reality.

Phase 4 – Integration.  Then we integrate disparate data from your different sources.  We need to work closely with your IT organization to provide the connection between competitive, market intelligence and transaction data and create your custom Strategic Analytics Toolbox™.

Phase 5 – Testing and Feedback.  We work closely with your teams along every stage of the process to eliminate surprises and improve the quality of the results.

Phase 6 – Training.  Although the Strategic Analytics Toolbox is very intuitive, we provide the necessary training in order to fully exploit its potential within your business.  Attendees will learn how to perform strategic analysis and find the root causes for performance, instantly and interactively.  Training includes real world practical exercises to perform diagnostics for your own business.

Phase 7 – Maintenance  Your business is dynamic; nothing stays the same:  market trends change, your competition tries new attacks, new opportunities arise and customers decide to merge.  Your marketing and sales teams are on top of this but need a process to funnel this information and keep the Strategic Analytics Toolbox accurately reflecting reality.

Personal Support.  The program includes unlimited support by phone and e-mail with same day response in most cases because you shouldn’t have to make an investment decision every time assistance is needed.

Is the Analytics Driven Profitability Program right for you and your organization?

We work with companies that struggle to get the information they need to increase profitability.  They all share the frustration of internal transactional data that does not provide the clear strategic direction necessary for driving profitable growth.

The Analytics Driven Profitability Program was designed for mid size businesses that struggle to increase profit because their strategic business leaders, R&D, marketing and sales professionals cannot make sense of their own data to grow the business.  We show them how to turn their data into a competitive advantage to beat the competition and increase market share, profit and cash flow.

Our goal is to get your teams on the same strategic frame of mind to instill a deeper collective understanding of the Market-Business-Profit interaction necessary for the creation of value for your customers.

You are in business for many reasons but the main one is to make a profit.  The whole objective of our program is to provide your commercial teams with the fast analysis tools they need to increase your bottom line by at least 10%.  If we are not fully convinced that our work will improve your profitability we won’t take on the project.

Different clients need different things.  One size does not fit all.  We custom design a Strategic Analytics Toolbox to produce the results your company needs.

We don't like Bureaucracy.  Processes are important, but if your organization is passionate about complexity or bureaucracy this is not for you.

Where do you go from here?

If you have read this far, you might be wondering whether this program could work for your company or not.  One way to help answering that question is our complimentary Strategic Analytics Session.

During the session we’ll explore the challenges you and your team face, the kind of results you’d like to see, and whether this program will be of help or not.  Even if the program isn’t a fit, you and your team will leave the conversation with more clarity about your issues and excited about what’s possible for the future.

If this introductory session is something you could see your team doing, the process starts with a brief, no-obligation call to get acquainted, discuss your situation, and determine who needs to be involved.  And rest assured.  We’ll never push you to make a decision or pressure you in any way - that’s simply not how we work.

The initial conversation will take about one hour and can be done ideally in person, or by phone.  Click here to arrange a time to have a strategy session and I will be in contact with you within the next 24 hours.

Looking forward to seeing how we can help.

Warmest Regards

Bill Cabiro

Bill

Managing Director

Strat-Wise Consulting

 Contact Us

Thanks for spending time in our web site, I hope you found it valuable.  I trust you've downloaded the report and learned more about my favorite subject.  I would like to have the chance to talk with you and see if we can help you in your business.

        In summary, our services may be for you if: 

• You are a business leader stiving to make sense of your own company's data to improve profitability. 

• Your commercial teams feel they are drowning in an ocean of data and still thirsty for strategic knowledge.

• Your company struggles because your business intelligence software delivers just raw data that neither has strategic meaning nor provides the immediate strategic analysis and direction necessary to grow your businesses profitably.  

Now that you’ve seen the programs we offer and how they can help you grow your business, If you’d like to find out how you achieve your desired results, you can call me, Bill Cabiró, at (262) 681-2869 for a simple, no obligation discussion. Or if you prefer, just fill out the form below.  We appreciate your initiative in taking this step to make a difference!

In this discussion, we'll find out about your objectives and the challenges your strategic and commercial teams are facing.   If there's a fit, we offer a complimentary session to understand your problems and opportunities and to explore how we can help your team increase market share, profitability and cash flow by using our Strategic Analysis Toolbox™.

We respect your email privacy:
 
We do not share our contact list with anyone for any reason, nor do we send unsolicited emails.  Additionally, you may remove yourself from the list anytime you choose with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails.

 

Ready to Tackle Your Strategic Analytics Issues? 

This free strategy session helps you identify obstacles to data-driven profitable growth and explore the kind of results you’d like to achieve with the resources you already have.

If your teams are drowning in data but thirsty for the strategic information they need to grow the business, we hope you’ve found the information on this site useful.  Strat-Wise has been able to help strategic business leaders, R&D, marketing and sales professionals become more competitive and increase market share, profit and cash flow. 

If this is the kind of improvement you are looking for, consider registering for our Strategic Analytics Session.

Our Strategic Analytics Session is an in-depth discovery interview, held either by telephone or in person, in which we gather information that allows us to explore the challenges you and your team face, the kind of results you’d like to see, and whether this program will be of help or not.

To make sure everyone gets maximum value out of this session, we provide you and your team with a pre-consultation questionnaire.  The consult itself typically takes about an hour and a half, and the session can usually take place within 1-2 weeks of your sign-up.  Just register below, and we will be in touch for a brief discussion about your company’s issues and to schedule the session.

Yes, I’m interested in tackling my company’s constraints in a complimentary Strategic Analytics Session:

Strategy Session Request Name: Company: Title: Email: Phone: Convenient day & time for a brief call: Other convenient day & time for a brief call: Customer profitability info is hard to extract   Only experts can access data   Customer data doesn't always make sense   Market data is missing / not accurate   Competitor data is missing / not accurate   The information is not strategic   Most analyses need to be run in Excel   Analysts are the process bottleneck   It takes too long to get the right information   Most decisions are based on experience   It's hard to answer complex business questions   Issues I'd like to address: Other issues I'd like to address::

We respect your email privacy:

We do not share our contact list with anyone for any reason, nor do we send unsolicited emails.  Additionally, you may remove yourself from the list anytime you choose with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails.   

 Useful Definitions

• Data: Any string of characters that describes something about our reality. ⁽¹⁾

• Information: Data that answers a question asked. ⁽¹⁾

• Market Intelligence:  Undisclosed information about competitors as related to customers, products or markets.

• Knowledge: Complex body of information from diverse sources, acquired by study or experience through reasoning.

• Strategy:  Plan of action or method for completing specific objectives.

• Tactic:  Short-term method for achieving an end.

• Business Intelligence: Analytical process that transforms raw data into relevant, accurate and useable strategic knowledge. ⁽²⁾  The technology and practice of applying information to make decisions. ⁽³⁾

• Business Reality: The result of complex interactions between numerous market, business and profit measures and dimensions. ⁽⁴⁾

• Strategic Knowledge: Clear understanding and quantification of the relationship of Business Reality interactions in order to obtain profitable growth.  Essential knowledge to ensure sustainable and profitable growth of the company.  Necessary knowledge to devise plans to surprise, deceive and defeat competition. ⁽⁴⁾   

Data Refinement Hierarchy

References:
(1) Eliyahu M. Goldratt – The Haystack Syndrome (Theory of Constraints).
(2) Kirk Tyson – Business Intelligence.
(3) IBM – White Paper.
(4) Bill Cabiró – From Corporate Information to Strategic Knowledge 

Covid-19 Global Tracking Metrics

This is an interactive global tracking of Covid-19 designed to compare key metrics across countries and United States.  

This visual analysis is kept up to date on a daily basis.

Navigation Tips:

1) Click on the Presentation Mode Icon on the bottom right.

2) Explore the different interactive dashboards by clicking on the top tabs.

3) Select the desired filters to review the different KPIs and uncover results.

4) You can download the Visualization.

Select the device to be used:       Phone                Computer

Is Your Business Analytics Driving Profitability?

By Bill Cabiró

It should be no surprise that data-driven decision making works better than relying on managers’ intuition.

Research clearly shows that analytics oriented organizations outperform their peers but making sense of the data becomes an increasingly challenging task as corporate data continues to grow at a 40% yearly rate as a result of the rapidly declining cost of computer memory.

An IBM CFO study shows that analytics-driven organizations had 33% more revenue growth, 12 times the earnings (before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) and 32 percent more return on capital invested.

This is where Business Analytics (BA) becomes crucial in providing data management, integration, multi-dimensional analysis, visual discovery, data mining and statistical methods to improve productivity in nearly every business function.

Business Analytics is an all-encompassing name for a new discipline resulting from the integration of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics.  BA not only includes the classic Business Intelligence functions of reporting what happened, drill-down to how it happened, find out the cause of why it happened and alert management as soon key metrics move in the wrong direction.

In addition, BA includes a highly sophisticated subject called Predictive Analytics that can be defined as Advanced Computational Statistics.  It uses large cleansed historical data sets to look forward.  Specifically, Predictive Analytics finds patterns in the data to forecast what has a high probability to happen in the future.

BA application includes operational intelligence, strategic and competitive analytics, customer acquisition and retention, risk management, fraud detection and demand driven forecasting among others.

According to Tom Davenport, “Companies that invest heavily in advanced analytical capabilities outperform the S&P 500 on average by 64%”.

Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes.  Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.

 

In their book, “Competing on Analytics – The Science of Winning”, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris define decision support, business intelligence, data mining and predictive analytics and put all these concepts well in perspective.

The book shows the five stages of analytical competency and gives plenty of examples of companies that are successful in both the internal and external implementation.

Stage 1: Analytically Impaired – Lack of analytical skill or executive interest.

Stage 2: Localized Analytics – Uncoordinated activities or silos.

Stage 3: Analytical Aspirations – Good intentions with slow progress.

Stage 4: Analytical Companies – Widely use analytics internally.

Stage 5: Analytical Competitors – Use analytics as a competitive advantage.

Business Analytics is a fundamental discipline to find the root cause of issues and probable outcomes.  Taking prompt corrective actions tends to satisfy customers’ needs faster and better than the competition providing the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is.

Up until now, BA has been the exclusive domain of large companies that were able to afford the investment.  Companies like Bank of America, Progressive Insurance, Amazon, Google, Walmart, Capital One and Google were pioneers in this area.

This is no longer the case.  Today, there are many choices of analytic applications, either on premise or in the cloud, that are powerful, user friendly and very inexpensive.  Mainly designed for business users, they include interactive data discovery, self-serve visual analytics  and open source statistical tools that require minimal IT involvement, making them ideal to transform small companies into analytic competitors.

Regardless of the company size, the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company.

Unfortunately, today many small companies are still unclear about the value analytics can bring to their business. Others, while aware of the value may not be fully prepared to effectively utilize it.  So what steps can a small business take to begin effectively using analytics?

A starting point would be to determine where your business stands regarding the capability to use data and analytics. This can be done in less than10 minutes using our free assessment tool for small businesses.

Based on your responses to several questions this tool will grade your company’s capability level in the analytical landscape.  After you finish the grader, you may want to download the Suggested Action Plan Report to help you take the next step in your company’s Business Analytics journey.