Become a Data Driven Business with Data Automation Tools

March 2020

Many companies today are striving to become data-driven, but what does that mean exactly?

It is more than just visualisations and interactive dashboards with nice charts and graphs.

It is about putting in place the right data automation process to align with your business strategy, systems and culture. It’s about creating a mindset in which analytics form the basis of all fact-based business decisions and are embraced by all levels of the organization.

Just like electricity, data has become a basic enterprise asset that is quickly revolutionizing the world, enabling better, faster, cheaper business processes. Data-driven organizations are committed to gathering data concerning all aspects of the business. The more your business can make use of data automation tools the greater your competitive advantage will be. These tools enable employees at every level to make use of all the data available in a fast and efficient way, to gain greater insight and foster conclusive and more efficient decision-making.

How to unlock the value of data

Unlike traditional enterprises, data-driven organizations don’t grow linearly, but exponentially. Just look at the spectacular growth of companies like Amazon and Google. These companies have built their entire business models around the exploration and exploitation of information and data.

What these companies have in common is a data-centric approach that goes beyond operational excellence. This requires them to put data automation and analysis front and centre in everyday business processes. To think beyond silos and even the company’s own walls (literally and metaphorically) to build meaningful collaborations.

But how does your business achieve this?  The first step is to make use of the latest technologies in Data Automation Tools.

The benefits of Data Automation Tools

Data Automation Tools can provide your business with insights that you might have otherwise been unable to see, both forward-looking (forecasting) and backwards-looking (analysis and reporting). Some of the ways in which it does this are:

Increased speed of data-driven analytics

Data Automation Tools can do in a fraction of the time what was previously a manual process done by data analysts.  With this increase in speed, you can conduct more in-depth analysis, which will give you insights previously unavailable. Depending on your business, through the use of data automation tools, you could get more detailed with your analysis, and analyse by day rather than week or month, or hour rather than day.

In addition to providing easy access to more detailed and informative data on which to conduct the analysis, the use of data automation tools will also free up more time of your data analysts time.  This will allow them to place more focus on finding new insights into your data and business to ultimately help with your businesses data-driven decision making, as opposed to preparing the data for analysis.

More accurate forecasting and planning

Data Automation tools can also help improve your ability to gain forward-looking insights. Whilst the processing of historical/actual data helps to understand how and why or your historical performance, the real competitive advantage is in how you can utilise these insights for forward planning.

These tools can vastly improve your forecasting and planning processes in much the same way as they improve your analytical capabilities. A faster process means your business is more flexible to changing market conditions. Using data automation tools for your forecasting and planning will allow you to more quickly incorporate the latest actuals into your forecasts, compare different scenarios, and test the sensitivities of these to a multitude of inputs and drivers.  All of these improve the ability of your business to make the data-driven decision that is best for your business.

At bi5 we have recently helped an NFP community services organisation do just that. As an NFP there is essentially no margin to ‘buffer’ any budget to actual variance. Any under-budgeting of expenses will lead to a loss, as opposed to a lower profit (hopefully) in a for-profit business. This meant the accuracy of their budget was extremely important. Through the use of a data automation tool they have been able to get an even more accurate budget, with employee costs (their main expense) now able to be determined down to individual calendar days. This is paramount for businesses with shift based employees, where shift loadings change depending on the day of the week and start and end times.

Save time and money

Computer resources are less expensive than employee time when it comes to data analysis.  Through reducing the time to generate reports, provide data for analysis, or to generate and finalise budgets, you are also saving costs. We have seen many businesses who budget for large amounts of overtime expense in reporting and budgeting season. Through the implementation of data automation tools, they’ve been able to reduce both their overtime expense whilst also providing results and finalised budgets in a more timely manner, with the added bonus of a happier and less-stressed workforce.