History Can Guide Your Business – If You Have The Data
By Tim Garcia, CEO, Apptricity
It’s been written that history can guide you in perilous times. That’s true. The problem is, many people – and many businesses – have lacked a reliable, organized system for storing and sorting historical facts. As a result, they tended to suffer the same fate, time after time. That’s all changing now, thanks to Big Data.
We now have the ability to compile millions – or billions – of bits and pieces of information that make up our lives and businesses. More importantly, we now have software that allows us to summon the facts we need on command, in whatever form we need them, on whatever device we choose, in any place on earth.
That’s amazing when you think about it, and it is transforming our world. We’re not just capturing data for data’s sake. Organizations are using it as a guide to better mission-critical decisions, whether their business is building airplanes, supplying troops, delivering groceries, selling hamburgers or making auto loans. Indeed, harnessing the raw potential in that data has become the key differentiator between success and failure.
We see new examples of this every day across industries. In financial services, companies use data for better predictive analysis. Car companies wire cars to collect data that cuts maintenance costs and even avoids crashes. Logistics companies gather data on equipment to analyze and identify failure risks. Even Hollywood movie studios are is doing it, running scripts through data analysis to improve the chances of a box-office hit.
Everywhere, information is in play, whether it’s a history of transactions, product movement, procurements, inventory levels or supply and demand. The smartest companies are well down this road. Most of the big-name disruptors to emerge in the last decade – I’m thinking about Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and the like – are built on analytics. It’s the core of what they do.
But companies of all sizes and types – not just the web giants – need the benefits of data, and for all kinds of reasons. A market study last summer found CEOs demanding better analytics due to factors including compliance, security, fraud detection and risk management. CEOs as never before require full organizational transparency to hone in on what makes them tick, where they can be more efficient and how they can move needed supplies from Point A to Point B without interruption.
As a former developer and founder of a company that helps companies optimize both their supply chain and financial operations, I have seen organizations struggle to achieve the promise. For many, their data is locked in mainframe databases not easily accessible or scattered across several databases that don’t talk to each other. Some, worse yet, still keep records on paper.
The trick for those companies is to knit all that data together, and many of them are now doing that with the help of next-generation enterprise applications that slice through organizational silos and help them become smarter in every facet of operations.
With these new capabilities, they can avoid delivery problems while optimizing warehouse space. Or they can determine how many shipping clerks they’ll need on a certain day. Or they can capture data about how and where company money is being spent on air travel, hotels, office supplies, etc., in order to negotiate lower prices and bulk discounts.
Along the same lines, integrated procurement and inventory/warehouse management applications help them anticipate in real time which products need to be replenished, and when. Mobile technology is being employed across the spectrum, allowing data access from anywhere and optimizing fleet service vehicles based on past delivery times and even current traffic.
The possibilities are virtually endless. Everything business needs to make better decisions is out there, just waiting to be interpreted. But if you can’t access the numbers or don’t have a way to draw meaning from them, your organization will prove another man correct when he said, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”