“By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes. A sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.”
– David McCandless
In today’s world there is a vast amount of data and information, and with a lot of data there comes a lot of questions not just around the data but also around “How do I make sense of this data?”.
These questions are easy, if not within a few clicks, answered by analytics and visualizations and thereby Business Intelligence tools and platforms.
Business intelligence (BI) platforms help companies, by showing their data in a visually appealing format within their business context to help them with their decision making.
Industrial OEMs using BI tools
For Industrial OEMs, BI tools have been described as a powerful complement to their already existing enterprise solutions such as ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, Financial, and Asset Management applications. Some of the popular BI tools which we’ve seen Industrial OEMs use are Tableau, PowerBI, Qlikview, and sometimes Salesforce analytics as well.
According to Guide Technologies, companies can use BI through many critical use cases some of which are:
- Get a bird’s-eye view of customer information
- Identify your most profitable customers, products & channels
- Identify your best & worst performing suppliers
- Optimize inventory and synchronize production with customer demand
- Improve sales forecasting
- Reduce the administrative & technical demands of measurement & reporting
Can Industrials get access to ALL the insights through a BI tool? How accurate are these insights?
“To find signals in data, we must learn to reduce the noise – not just the noise that resides in the data, but also the noise that resides in us. It is nearly impossible for noisy minds to perceive anything but noise in data.”
– Stephen Few
Through our experience, we’ve realized that all Industrial OEMs have one common problem – having a clean, unified, deduplicated single source of truth for data. Some of these companies are already aware of this problem and have accepted it whereas others might not yet be aware of it until they start transitioning to an IBP (Installed Base Platform). This is the most important (yet understated) step to success for any Industrial OEM to start finding insights through their data.
But are BI platforms able to normalize the data from multiple sources, in multiple formats, having incomplete and inconsistent data which should not just be labeled as ‘Unknown’ or ‘Unidentified’ but able to derive value from such data?
BI tools are great for visualizing your data, but until the data you are feeding into the BI platform isn’t complete you might not be getting the complete picture of your data limiting you from getting accurate insights.
How can Industrials create actionable insights for their teams to work on?
BI tools help create visualizations and insights which help in understanding how your company is doing or probably even go a step further by forecasting/projecting sales or inventory, but when it comes to creating “actionable insights” the Entytle Installed Base Platform helps you take these insights a step further by creating opportunities or leads with details on “what do you need to do with this customer” which could be assigned to your team. Using these opportunities, they could proactively reach out to your customers along with having all the details on “what am I reaching out to this customer about”.
This directly helps you create these insights into revenue conversion by not just making sense of the data but also creating it into a sales opportunity that you could maximize!
Can Industrials forecast sales in a BI tool or an Installed Base Platform?
The answer is YES, you can absolutely forecast sales in most BI platforms and the Entytle Installed Base Platform as well. The only difference between the two is that the BI platform will forecast how much you will be making and will not easily provide you details like ‘Which customers are likely to contribute to my sales’ and ‘Which customers have the potential to contribute to my sales but haven’t been purchasing from me who I should pursue. Entytle Installed Base Platform will answer these questions for you in their platform as an inbuilt feature without any customizations which help you focus not just on your “superstar” or “key account” customers but also those customers who you’ve not connected within a while.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can Data Science services be used to create value out of the data I have today using either a BI platform or an IBDP?
Entytle has an expert in-house Data Science team as well proprietary AI algorithms, through which various use cases can be created catering specifically to your business which includes part predictions, creating kits, increasing order size, exposing your customer’s wallet share, defining how much revenue potential your customer is missing out on and many others.
When it comes to BI platforms, you might not easily be able to implement these use cases which Entytle Installed Base Platform might bring to you unless you hire a data scientist who works explicitly on the data you currently have, *remember which you would still need to cleanse, dedupe, and standardize* before passing it over to the BI tool.
I have many tools/platforms today, and I don’t think I am ready to have yet another tool. What would you recommend?
We could integrate your ERP, CRM systems as well as BI platforms with the Entytle Insyghts platform so you have the ability to keep your operational processes intact along with having “actionable insights” provided by the Entytle Insyghts platform which you could utilize to maximize your sales potential as well as help retain your customer base.
Interested to learn more about Entytle’s Installed Base Platform? Contact us