Enabling BI for Field Force
In today’s era of globalization, many employees spend a long time without access to right information from Enterprise Systems such as ERP. Organizations cannot afford to have these employees disconnected from the information. As a result, BI is becoming a necessity. Field sales force must be armed with the right information at the exact point of time needed to help turn every customer Interaction into revenue generating opportunity. Extend the power of BI software to the field force and create new business opportunities, by grabbing data from existing databases.
Some of the potential benefits of BI for field force include:
Allowing companies to further leverage their investments in data warehouses and analytical applications by making decision support available.
Offering secured information access to information needed by field workers ranging from sales force personnel, service technicians, and transporters to managers and executives.
Consider the following scenarios:
A company salesperson can find out the amount of business the company has already done with an existing customer the salesperson is scheduled to meet with, compute the overall value of a potential customer, access inventory, and check shipping dates on customer orders using BI.
A sales manager can check sales figures from the BI software.
A supplier can determine how well products are currently moving through a distributor’s pipeline.
While on field, a customer service manager is alerted to the fact that a branch is receiving an unusually high number of customer service calls, allowing the manager to shift service calls to other operations to take up the load.
The company CXO can access key performance indicators from his Dashboard while having the enterprise-wide view.
BI in Insurance Industry
BI gives insurers, brokers and agents the opportunity to strengthen their relationships with their end-users, establishing a richer customer experience.
Agents: Access to insurance product information and customer data, maximizes customer loyalty. Follow up can be made anytime, anywhere.
Brokers: Product catalogues and reporting information can be made available quickly, reducing sales cycles.
Insurers: BI, can bring the differentiation to organization from the competition. Various technologies are being used to collect information in the field. Thus creating greater accuracy, speed and creating savings in claims processing.
Employees are comfortable using spreadsheet, so there’s less of a learning curve for training and deployment of an BI tool. Executives are warming to the benefits of BI, such as being able to respond to critical issues faster and helping managers more proactively manage sales, production, projects and people
BI consists of delivering information from the enterprise systems to field workers and key decision makers as per their roles. It allows companies to leverage their existing BI investment, and extend the advantage of the analytic applications to their workforce.
The advantage of BI is its ability to deliver rich content with the lowest TCO, across various layers in the organization, quickly and easily.
Capability to deliver a host of functionality
BI has taken the business world by storm. Since the advent of the BI and its increasing capability to deliver a host of functionality, executives are accustomed to unparalleled information availability. Which is why Business intelligence, is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must have application.
Information from a BI deployment can also be accessed using a browser providing roll-up, roll-down, slice, pivot and charting.
BI, enables access to Enterprise wide information. The users, who benefit the most from BI, could be managers / decision makers. On demand access to sales results, trends, and analysis will provide these users with a new level of accessibility to enterprise reports.
BPM offers organization powerful business benefits, such as the ability to track performance, identify trends, and plan intelligently for the future.
Improve decision-making capability by accessing operational and strategic information. Field employees will continue to seek better ways of doing their jobs more effectively. No longer bound by timely availability of data, business professionals are increasingly able to do business anywhere, anytime.
Organizations suffer from a fundamental data access issue. Executives are empowered to access, analyze and share information when they are sitting at their desks or, if they are lucky, when they are sitting in a hotel, accessing their corporate servers. BI, can enhance productivity by having quick access to Enterprise Performance indicators on the move. The pull mode allows retrieving real-time reports from the enterprise system.
By leveraging MIS reporting and analytics, BI, can pack a lot of information rapidly – once again, with an associated payload of data that enables users to display charts and tables.
BI is here to stay, and the benefits are enormous. Ability to deliver enterprise BI at a reasonable price will enhance the overall products and service offering, across product versions.
Posted on April 13th, 2009 by Vikram Kole
Filed under: Business Intelligence
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