Business Intelligence Quiz: How well do you know your business? Part 2

Here’s a quick exercise you can do in your head; think about your home neighborhood and draw a mental road map to your local grocery store.  Simple.  You can visualize the route you take to get groceries back home.   Try to maintain that highlighted route in your mind, like a google map, and start adding these to it one by one.  Think about:

·         The route your electric and water take to get to your home

·         The service route your waste management carrier takes

·         The route your local police take when patrolling your neighborhood

·         The route you take to get fuel

·         The route you take to the office (and add in any deviations you sometimes take)

That should do it.  It starts to get convoluted quickly, and more difficult to think about the more obscure things that are out of your realm of influence or knowledge.

For many business owners that’s a lot like their operations.  They can clearly see the things that are in their immediate sphere of influence, and they can cut lines between their departments easily (like roads) – but when it comes to the routes and tasks that specific projects and workflows take it’s not easy to remember.

In our first post in this series, I talked about gaining a fresh perspective so you can clearly see – and regain control of – your revenue.  This time we’re talking about getting a better perspective on your operations and how your teams work together to generate revenue.

Because when the business was new you might have been able to visualize and track projects among departments and team members on service operations but businesses grow. And you can’t maintain that same perspective forever without losing control.

Let’s try another questionnaire like we did in part 1.

Business Intelligence Quiz

1.     Can you identify the two most profitable products or services in your organization?

2.     Do you know your least profitable product or service?

3.     Of your top 3 products or services, do you know which grew the fastest?

4.     Do you know how many billable vs. non-billable hours your team averages during a pay cycle?

5.     Are you able to evaluate your departments based on utilization? performance? Profit generation? Any metric at all?

Just like in part 1, the best response is yes to each of the questions.  That means you’ve got your data under control and you’re on the right track to understanding operations and team performance.  If you have even to just a few no’s, then there are elements of control and perspective that we need to fix.

Get your operations back under control

A comprehensive business management software suite has long the tool business managers use to reclaim control.  It goes beyond revenue to help you track all the elements of your business from a fresh perspective.

·         Improve staff utilization

·         Track customers via an integrated CRM

·         Project management tools

·         Accounting

·         HR

·         Production and logistics for your warehouse team

Overall, it reduces the lag time it takes to keep your operations humming each day.  Communication is improved, staff is optimized, fulfillment times improve, numbers match and time is saved.  You no longer have to guess at the routes between your departments and how everything works together.  No more mental tracking or jumbled road maps.

ERP software is the solution that lets you leverage greater freedom so you have the time to step outside of the muck and mire, take in the view, and see your business with a whole new perspective.

Take the complete Business Intelligence Quiz from part 1 and part 2 with custom results based on your responses.

Definitions : BI or Business Intelligence

Every company seems to have a different definition of business intelligence, so let’s talk about the basics, and then how we think of it here at Milestone.

BI is a term used for analyzing and reporting on data from multiple sources.

Milestone Definition: Business Reporting is the rear view mirror, it tells you about what’s happening today and yesterday.

Milestone Definition: Business Intelligence tells you about more than what’s happening in your business today, it tells you about the future.