With the offset of the product-based approach of selling insurance products that was so successfully used for more than half a century, and the subsequent onset of a customer-driven approach, insurance companies are increasingly making the switch to a Business Intelligence powered products. Customers are now desirous of a cluster of products from one single source that is able to meet their needs. This makes insurance companies make use of Business Intelligence tools such as data mining, data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP).

Business Intelligence applied in insurance assists in creating a superior management dealing sales force, marketing, enhancing actuarial and underwriting functions. This improves the ability to transform the raw data into valuable information related to the customer, market competition, and the overall business environment. Life insurance is divided as life, health, and other products in installment basis. Also, enterprises are focused on individual customer’s needs rather than the products values. This means that companies are concerned with the requirements of the customers, which can only be derived from gathered information. For this purpose, and for the technological advancement that it provides, insurance companies make use of Business Intelligence.

BI churns out the important data and helps the management take the company to the next level. From the management perspective, Business Intelligence tools supervise the key performance indicators of the enterprise, including the profitability level, on a daily basis. In terms of marketing, it analyzes sales, distribution channel performances, and marketing campaigns and lapses. In addition, it generates cross-selling and up-selling reports. But Life Insurance industry is highly competitive with numerous companies trying to attract customers with innovative products. Most competitors can imitate each other’s products; therefore, the speed and execution become extremely crucial factors for improving business and market share. Furthermore, the information’s ability to provide the users with strategic and critical information, which will sway customer’s to purchase is of paramount importance.

BI helps enhance every function of the insurance chain by scrutinizing each function. It helps in profiling customers and ensuring that the most apt customers are targeted by the marketing strategies and also examines the causes for customer attrition. It assists the insurance company to optimize the usage of its agents and sales force, while also enhancing the effectiveness of the actuarial and underwriting functions. Business Intelligence helps in identifying and eliminating fraud selection, and also aids in estimation of claims. It significantly lowers the insurer’s risk by applying sophisticated risk models, developed by applying data mining tools. What’s more, Business Intelligence tools can facilitate the provision of vital information to corporate clients, which can lead to many a prosperous relationship between insurer and client.

One example for effective usage of BI will be as follows..

Let us consider a Life Insurance Company which has another company providing Vehicle Insurance. Vehicle insurance company has database of all the vehicle users with information of their age, profession, location etc. Based on this information Life insurance company can design specific product for customers. This will include following steps –

1. Find out the customer from Vehicle insurance who are not Life Insurance customer for the company
2. Segregate these customers by their age, location, profession, risks involved in their profession etc.
3. On basis of this information one can find out the potential market for respective product or customize existing product which will be suitable to the target customer.

This kind of usage of information and analysis of the information can result in creating many new customer segments untapped by competition. It can also help in new product development.

BI can help Insurers with following aspects –

• Reduce marketing cost by identifying duplicate member records
• Optimize insurance payments
• Trend, analyze agent performance and paid commissions
• Execute monthly Sales and Marketing report to analyze policy Issue count, Issue volume, Issue premium
• Detect the bottleneck for issuing high face value policies
• Reports to view policy by face amount, by gender, by age, by occupation etc.
• Identify policy response time (based on date applied and date issued)
• Integrate data from multiple life insurance systems, specialty insurance and subsidiary companies

Business Intelligence can improve the productivity and helps bring in the flexibility that most life insurance companies are looking for. Not to mention it can also help with the information-handling process, resulting a boost in the employee morale and raising their confidence levels. This makes business intelligence applications a must have for life insurance industry and can influence the organization to undergo a highly positive paradigm shift.

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The analytic approach with Theory Of Constraints comes from the contention that any manageable system is limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints, and that there is always at least one constraint. Hence the TOC process seeks to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. An organization can achieve operational speed with strategic direction to outmaneuver competitors, gain loyalty with customers, and rapidly build sustainable earnings growth. You can apply these insights and methods to your organization — be it business, not-for-profit, manufacturing, or service based — in order to shorten lead times, slash inventories, reduce production variability, and increase sales. So how does ToC work?

The theory of constraints (TOC) adopts the common idiom “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link” as a new management paradigm. This means that processes, organizations, etc., are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them or at least adversely affect the outcome. The 3 dimensions of TOC are Throughput (the expected end result), Inventory (any kind of investment or assets; monetary or knowledge or Work in Progress) and Operational expense (the efforts the system makes in order to turn inventory into throughput). But the most important idea is the achievement of organizational goal.

Before the goal itself can be reached, Necessary Conditions must first be met. This typically includes safety, quality, legal obligations, etc. For most businesses, the goal itself is to make money. However, for many organizations and non-profit businesses, making money is a necessary condition for pursuing the goal. Whether it is the goal or a necessary condition, understanding how to make sound financial decisions based on throughput, inventory, and operating expense is a critical requirement

Theory of constraints is based on the premise that the rate of goal achievement is limited by at least one constraining process. Only by increasing flow through the constraint can overall throughput be increased. The biggest problem with bottlenecks or constraints is, IF WE DO NOT MANAGE THEM, THEY WILL MANAGE THE PROCESS and THE THROUGHPUT.

ToC can help by providing a form of control, wherein, every bottleneck or constraint in the design and build processes is identified. The most important constraint is then analyzed and it is decided how that constraint can be exploited. All other processes that are not constraints are subordinated to this constraint. Then the bottleneck in the process is handled. Action is taken so that the bottleneck will disappear and the constraint is broken. What will happen is that another process will automatically become a new constraint. This constraint is then handled in the way the first one was. The Theory of Constraints simplifies the process of planning and decision making on the basis of problems and issues a great deal.

ToC can be used in 2 ways for BI..
1. For implementation of BI
The ideology of ToC can be used in Software Project Management. This theory states that the most important bottleneck in the project needs to be identified. The outputs of all other activities related to this bottleneck are then fixed. Those activities do not output more than a bottleneck can handle. Then the problems and issues in the bottleneck activity are solved. Automatically a new activity will then become the bottleneck in the project. By directing the project only with a focus on solving the problems in a bottleneck activity, the monitoring and control elements become much easier to manage.
Here, ToC can be applied for Project Management of BI. One can identify constraints restricting success of deployment of BI tool and then by eliminating the bottlenecks project can be completed successfully. This approach can be used for any software project or knowledge based project management.

2. Usage of BI tool for eliminating constraints with effective decision.
In this approach we can use ToC to identify the constraints of the system and eliminate them. Here, we need to identify the business objectives for improvement. These objectives in turn will give us the constraints that are restricting the expected results.
For eg. For Sales improvement one needs effective Sales Planning. But for effective sale planning we require historical information of sales. Here, if the past information required is incorrect then entire project can fail. BI tool can help find the correct information to facilitate the management to determine the Sales Plan. Let us consider another scenario where prices are slashed for increasing sales. This may result in improving sales figures. But at the same time management must be aware of the resulting changes in Profitability which in turn is another objective for overall growth. Here both objectives aggregating to overall growth of the organization are conflicting with each other. In such cases, BI can help make an informed decision on the strategic front.

The biggest benefit of using ToC was identifying the most significant constraint. It is this constraint that has the greatest impact on the corporate objective of the company. One of the indirect benefits of using this approach is it helps identify all the constraints that are internal in nature and could be elevated internally.

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Since BI serves as a tool for decision-making, it is imperative that data coming from database / data warehouse system be accurate. One cause of inaccurate data is contamination due to errors, duplicate or missing items, and other inconsistencies.

Data cleansing, synonymous with the less frequently-used term data scrubbing is the process of detecting and correcting (and if necessary eliminating) corrupt or inaccurate records from a particular (single or multiple) record set, table, or database. Used mainly in databases, the term refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate, irrelevant etc. parts of the data to replace, modify or delete this so called dirty data to ensure that a given set of data is accurate and consistent with other sets in the system. The actual process of data cleansing may involve removing typographical errors, inconsistencies or validating and correcting values against a known list of entities. The validation may be strict (such as rejecting any address that does not have a valid postal code) or fuzzy (such as correcting records that partially match existing, known records).

The root cause of inconsistent data is often that the data sources have discrepancies in format, an inconsistent, missing or duplicated value which means that a single version of the truth is not achieved. Data inconsistencies may arise when:

• Different data dictionary definitions of similar entities are used in different data stores.
• User entry errors
• Data corruption during transmission or storage.

The process of checking the quality of the data being imported into the data warehouse for BI is called Data Quality Assurance. A significant portion of time in the development process of BI project should be set aside for setting up the data quality assurance process and implementing whatever data cleansing is needed.

After cleansing, a set of data is consistent with the rest of the system or, as it meets their standards and expectations, it can be delivered to the business community.

The importance of regular data cleansing is unquestionable in any data based or data dependent business as its impact of using inaccurate and inconsistent data can cause serious problems on various levels

The process of data cleansing involves following steps:

1. Data Auditing
2. Workflow specification
3. Workflow execution
4. Post-processing and controlling

It is always best to address data quality as early in the cycle as you can. Popular methods for carrying out data cleansing are Parsing, Data transformation, duplication elimination and statistical methods.

Key points to be considered when the operational data for the BI target databases is identified and selected:

• integrity (the importance of internal integrity of the data – the most crucial criterion)
• precision (the precision of the data)
• accuracy (the correctness of the data)
• reliability (the source and generation of the data)
• format (the source and target format of the data – the closer they are, the fewer conversions they require)

Data cleansing is especially of great importance when a large amount of data is to be processed for BI. The goal of corrective action on the dirty data then is to make any errors as insignificant as possible. Unless data cleansing is undertaken regularly, mistakes can accumulate and lead to decreasing the efficiency of work.

Dirty Data must be eliminated as they will undermine the value of the BI data and the worth of the tool. If a number is wrong or does not reconcile to another, in a BI environment it gets quickly challenged. As a result the organization ends up with higher quality at all levels.

BI projects may well be constrained by data quality at first. But they get the issues in the open very fast and very well so they can be seen. The added cost of resolving then must be recognized and born, but the payback in the end is much higher too.

Success of any BI tool lies on the availability of data as well as how much data can be trusted. If data using which reports have been generated cannot be trusted then BI tool will undoubtedly fail miserably. Data is a prime asset which company can leverage the way it wants. BI helps to extract meaning out of information and helps in decision making process of organization. If the information itself is wrong, then the consequent interpretation will be wrong and subsequent decision taken will be wrong. BI tool if used intelligently can help point out to inconsistent or wrong data and help in increasing trust in data. Information held by the company is one of the pillars of the organization and hence trusted information is a priority.

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Every day at Pan India Foods, data from various POS was being transferred to HO and updated the back office application. Getting updated data from around 250 outlets was always a challenge for Pan India IT team. This manual work required late night working when the operations were shut. IT team was always under pressure and tremendous work load. On top of it a network problem could add to the worries. Updating this data in existing application and Data Warehouse almost took around 6-7 hours. Also many times, they did not get the data at all from some outlet. In that case the data coming from reporting module gave false information. Some or the other outlet data was missing.

Secondly, updating the warehouse required someone to be personally present and organize received data from various outlets. Being a time consuming process, it could not be executed in day-time as it would give more load to server and existing application, when there were many users accessing the system. Hence processing this data in night shift was another challenge.

As the outlets were increasing, the time taken for the warehousing process also took longer time. Even after putting so much of efforts, it was observed that some of the information was still missing.

Top five business challenges:

• Co-lateral of Data
• Analysis of the data
• Corrective action taken on time
• Projection of the business
• Reduce manpower

Solution

After lot of brain storming sessions, the IT team at Pan India came to conclusion that good analytical software could resolve the challenges. Long needed BI tool was the only option for the increasing data coming from various outlets. Whenever there is change in any report, generally it’s developed at central location and released to various users only after testing. Certain reports are scheduled, which are available to remote users by email. Due to the import functionality, even when there is no connection with the server, users could play around with the data and generate the desired output from the cube reports.

“Timely availability of information in the required format for enabling decision making was a challenge for our users.  With 1KEY, management can now depend on BI to implement various promotions for various outlets depending on season and festivals. It enables our users across outlets to easy access information on inventory that was just difficult to make available before. Now decisions by kitchen and purchase are made taking the availability of the product into account thereby reducing wastage and getting better rates. 1KEY provides an easy-to-use, integrated reporting and analytics platform that provides our end users greater business insight. We looked at other competing offerings, but preferred 1KEY’s end user experience and easy connectivity. We’ve found it to be extraordinarily feature-rich. MAIA’s consulting partner SSIS and its team, played a crucial role in the successful deployment of this BI project by providing technical support, services and training. They were involved right from project planning, scope study till actual implementation and even beyond.”

-           Siddharth Laskar, Head IT, Pan India Food Solutions

Why 1KEY BI

It was tough task to find the right product with right solution. So after evaluating different products company came across MAIA Intelligence’s 1KEY Agile BI Suite product which had value for money.

Pan India chose 1KEY because it was available at cost-effective price point, rapid development with all the user-friendly reporting and analysis features its users wanted. 1KEY‘s ease of use, flexibility and scalability has enabled & empowered the business users with a BI tool. It gave a higher level of business intelligence (BI) capabilities that:

• Able to easily connect with existing data
• Provide deep insight in YOY information
• Facilitated information-sharing among operation staff so they could better monitor inventory & sales in their appropriate contexts

Evaluation Parameters

While selecting the product, Pan India considered the vendor who is technically sound, and the application to be user friendly. Being in hospitality business, the handover had to be easy and require less time to train to new employees. The requirements were gathered with help of all Key Members, having experience in hospitality business and know the operations very well.

After an evaluation of competing BI products, Pan India selected 1KEY for enterprise-wide reporting analysis. BI tools were evaluated based on its ability to:

• Reporting analytics with ease of Use
• Cost Effective Solution
• Cater to needs of top management as well as operational users
• Empower the business users to build their own reports from the base cube
• Slice-n-dice the info for further analysis

Selection Process

Evaluation was done based on the business needs & what to analyze, as it was not easy to shift to ERP package immediately. So when IT was involved it was suggested to the management for creating data ware house. On top of DWH, analytical software was to be deployed to derive all the desired reporting analysis.

Implementation Plan

Initially it was decided to implement BI for 20 users from sales, MMS as these were the two critical areas.

Data was coming from different location centrally and hence the entire development was required to be done at Central Office only. It was planned to redevelop data warehouse, so that all the required reports could be generated locally. Remote users could access these reports using the web interface or VPN.

Initially the plan was to complete the BI project within couple of months. But as the actual development of the Data Warehouse started, the complexity of core database of existing application was discovered and hence project was spill over to nine months. There were numerous reports developed depending on POS, MMS as well as Tally.

The entire development was completed on time after which couple of users tested the new developed reports. All the key members from various outlets were given the training on actual data, post which all the reports were released.

Resistance is always there for any change, but change is constant rule of nature. It was because of top management’s sponsorship, implementation of BI project at all locations was possible. Due to aggressive role while implementation of the BI tool, Proper Planning from IT Team this was really difficult.

When users themselves saw the reports available in various dimensions, charts, they themselves liked this change.

Implementation Partner

The role of BI partner was challenging as they were required to understand the operation software from where they had to derive the role of BI for the business. S & S InfoTech and Software (SSIS), a MAIA Intelligence consulting partner was involved right from the evaluation, identify users, development of Data Warehouse as well as reports.  SSIS did the system study and jointly decided to redevelop the DWH.

Importance of BI

Data is very important. But only data cannot serve the business purpose. Putting the data on the presentable format and that also on time is very important in today’s competitive world. Today most of the organizations have ERP like tool to capture the transactional data.

Such data gets accumulated in large size over the years. When this data is presented in the presentable format it becomes information. This information helps to take critical decisions before condition become critical. BI helps transform data to information and knowledge.

The project which started in September 2011 was successfully completed in mere 9 months’ time.  A three days training was given on the self-serve BI tool. It is well appreciated by the business users across the departments like finance, operation, MIS, IT, etc.

Functional Areas Targeted

Being in hospitality industry, each and every transaction is important to Pan India. Fixed expenses like salary, rent, electricity, etc. were less impacted as compared to food quality and its inventory.

Being a customer oriented organization Customer is important for Pan India and is always concerned about the quality of food. Also the food wastage was to be reduced. But the major concern was inventory as many items are perishable, and needs proper care.

Apart from inventory, management was also concerned about the cover (number of customers per table) per day. They wanted to reduce the waiting period. Also there was a need to keep track on number of people visits at a given time.  (Morning Break Fast, Afternoon Lunch, Evening Break Fast or Dinner).

Benefits

PAN India’s business deals with complex method of operation where customer & lots of back office parameter take place. Basically its menu is bit complex as it deals with food preparation which involves lots of raw material. So at the start of MAIA’s 1KEY Agile implementation it started giving clear picture of products in terms of sale & procurement. It also helped to analyze which products are selling & producing better revenue.

Now the complete DWH update process does not takes more than 30 minutes.

Now more than required reports are available which helps senior management to take any critical decision. The development is done considering the future requirement too and reports are made available in all options like Drill Down, Charts, Dashboards including User Security, etc.

The major benefit IT team derived out of this BI project was time. Every morning when management needs the information, all the actual figures are readily available. Outlets are now monitored very closely with correct and authenticated information. With BI, users can compare the information across outlets and period.

Apart from that outlets also now have information about which material is available and in what quantity. Depending on the same, kitchen decides what to produce and what quantity? Also Purchase department can take decision about which items need to purchase and what quantity? As the Purchase Department having all the required information about demand and supply, they can now negotiate with vendors and get a very good price while doing the rate contract.

Depending on the feedback and data, management can bring various promotions to various outlets depending on season and festivals. The analysis with BI is done by top management as major decisions are taken by them. At present the BI access is given to the key users across departments. It was well accepted by the top management as it started giving results immediately on day to day basis.

With this tool, a self-serve BI for report availability has been provided. Lot of business users have started analyzing their own area related to data.

With proper implementation of BI technology hospitality retail division can have a dramatic change for the business.

“The keenness of Pan India Food’s top management and the capability of 1KEY BI helped SSIS team to successfully deploy BI solution at Pan India as per the requirements of the business users.”

-           Suryakant Nanaware, CEO, S & S Infotech and Software

Return On Investment

The IT team at Pan India is excited about the efficiencies they are realizing by standardizing on for enterprise monitoring, reporting, and analysis. This project has turned to form a great value proposition. Considering the information availability, BI tool is inexpensive. Rather, day by day BI is becoming business need.

It would be too early to calculate the ROI. But definitely BI has helped Pan India reduce the manpower cost of around 50,000 a month across various departments, which earlier was engaged to prepare the data.

1KEY Agile BI Suite came at a cost-effective price point. Although the ROI cannot be measured directly but yes it helped company to get better inventory on its raw material to analyze the same. CIO at Pan India is confident to achieve ROI within a year as this project helps reduce manual process of data consolidation and preparing reports and gives better understanding of sales mix. 1KEY Agile unique proposition or USP was its powerful & user friendly interface to do any analysis and present data in various dash board & graphs.

In short, 1KEY BI was the right analytical software to get more précised data in desired format with less dependency.

Partial List of Reports

Reports produced from the BI are now delivered directly to the company’s executives. BI makes information available from a wide range of departments at Pan India, such as:

• Expense Cost Center-wise reports for finance managers from Tally data. Earlier such were being manually consolidated in spreadsheet which were time consuming and error-prone.
• Branch Stock Transfer Bills from 1KEY Reporter (Static Reporting) for HO
• Sales & Purchase Analysis with 1KEY View for two-dimensional analysis
• Purchase Stock Summary
• Stores Stock Comparison Statements
• Week on Week comparison statements for stock, sales, gender-wise, store-wise, etc. with 1KEY Cube for multi-dimensional analysis
• KOT analysis
• Daily Sales Report
• Sales vs. consumption
• ABS analysis
• Inflation Report

Future Road-map

BI is an ongoing process. The way market is changing; the reports need to be modified from time to time and may need upgrade. Pan India being an growing organization; there will be need to increase the number of users. The BI deployment shall be expanded to mid-level of management users who support senior management. User community is expected to expand to almost all domains and most of the employees by the end of 2012. The company is in the process to integrate more operation software with this BI.

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The purpose of business is to create a customer

Loyalty program are proven way to engage, retain and enhance life time value of the customer with organizations. Technology integration is critical for business success

1KEY Solution Architecture & Design for Loyalty & Customer Centricity

Improve the Effectiveness of Customer Loyalty Programs

Companies across different industries use Loyalty Programs to drive and sustain growth, yet the majority of these programs fail to reach their targeted goals due to limited insight into the effectiveness of their programs on customer behavior. 1KEY Loyalty Analytics is a comprehensive analytic solution that provides new levels of information richness, usability and reach to all employees engaged in the loyalty program lifecycle. These results in faster and more informed decisions that help the loyalty organization optimize its programs to drive member behavior, build value and reduce costs.

1KEY Loyalty Analytics can help to overcome these challenges with its powerful analytical model and action links. For example, if the number of loyalty points expired goes above a threshold, it can be detected through key performance indicators (KPIs) displayed on the dashboard. Users can then interact with the dashboards to drill down into greater detail and determine if any behavioral pattern is evident or explore other reports that further analyze the members who are not making use of the loyalty points. Also, they can drill into the transactional system and launch new promotions or create marketing campaigns with targeted marketing messages reaching these members.

1KEY CRM Analytics

1KEY CRM Analytics solutions, is an outcome of 1KEY BI modules offering which provides fact-based insight into the entire sales process and into product demand, customer sensitivity, and overall customer centricity effectiveness. They enable firms to manage and track campaign performance, and to segment and retain the most valuable customers or partners. Organizations can assess the effectiveness of loyalty promotions and partner relationships, track and analyze key service center metrics, and generate a complete picture of contact center performance.

Building relationships with your most profitable and loyal customers can improve profit margins for your company.

1KEY Loyalty Analytics provides:

• Loyalty marketing managers with the ability to analyze member segments, identify which promotions to run and which members to target, and measure promotion effectiveness
• Loyalty partner managers with the ability to analyze partner contributions to program success and measure joint promotion effectiveness
• Executives with the ability to analyze loyalty program status, track budgets, evaluate membership trends and details, and summarize rewards and redemption trends overtime

1KEY Loyalty Analytics Dashboards will provide managers to understand customer segments and behaviors, track costs and liabilities, and manage partners.

Loyalty Program Overview Dashboard

The loyalty program overview dashboard, allows you to: Assess the overall performance of your loyalty program Gain an understanding of the current number of members, point balances, liabilities, costs and revenue of the programs. Analyze members’ movement among tiers as influenced by the loyalty program Analyze the revenue performance of loyalty members versus non-members

Membership Analysis Dashboard

The membership analysis dashboard allows you to: Understand the characteristics of members currently enrolled in the program Analyze member data to view the demographics of various program tiers and identify what influences the buying patterns of different member segments. Identify new enrollments and the member growth rates over time. Analyze member accruals and redemptions. Understand the influence of different loyalty promotions on customer transactions and behavior. Track the member point balance

Partner Dashboard

The partner dashboard, allows you to: Evaluate partner performance within the loyalty program by analyzing the partner’s contribution to the overall success of the program. Understand the impact a partner has on new member enrollment, shared members, and accrual and redemption trends Analyze the number of members that have been referred by partners and track how much revenue have they brought in over time.

Finance Dashboard

The finance dashboard allows you to: Understand the cost and revenue factors associated with the loyalty program Analyze the liability of the accrued points and the incremental revenue that is generated by the loyalty program and the associated promotions. Identify the costs associated with the various redemptions and rewards

Benefits -Faster Implementation, Lower Risk, and Better Business Results

Traditional business intelligence solutions are costly, require many months to implement, and are difficult to modify as business requirements change. In contrast, 1KEY Business Intelligence Applications are pre-built solutions designed for faster deployment at a lower cost, lower risk, and with better business results. 1KEY Business Intelligence Applications includes pre-built data models, metrics, and best practices based on MAIA Intelligence experience across multiple CRM and ERP reporting automation implementations. In addition, 1KEY robust enterprise analytics platform enables users to easily customize and extend the application without the need for programming. The intuitive, Web-based user interface requires very little training and ensures rapid end user adoption

The three key benefits of 1KEY BI access on web are:

Improve employee communication – Businesses today rely on an increasingly sales workforce on field. More employees need anywhere, anytime access to more data on web and collaboration information—in form of reports, dashboards and KPIs to track performance.

Maximize overall productivity – By giving employees access to company tools and data on web and off line cubes, they can be productive regardless of where they are or what time it is.

Increase customer satisfaction – Real-time access to customer data and insight can lead to improved customer satisfaction because employees will be able to respond to customer queries accurately and quickly.

1KEY Business intelligence (BI) is the process of collecting, structuring, analyzing, and making use of data to gain business insight. 1KEY BI enables more informed decision-making, thereby improving performance and efficiencies across the organization. For customer focused companies, 1KEY BI can be derived from a variety of systems, including sales, billing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM, and so on. Companies are using established 1KEY BI on data warehouse technologies and tools to access information from across the enterprise and to provide deep insight to their business decision makers. Using business intelligence, companies are making faster and more informed decisions that help them to optimize resources, reduce costs, and improve the effectiveness of front-end and back office activities, ranging from sales to human resources to procurement.

Having deep insight is critically important to providing a connected experience for customers. Companies use state of the art 1KEY BI modules to manage and track campaign performance, and to segment and retain their most valuable customers. They can assess the effectiveness of loyalty promotions and partner relationships, track and analyze key service center metrics, and generate a complete picture of contact center performance. These tools and the data they collect and analyze are providing sales associates with a 360 degree view of their customers.

Customer-centric 1KEY BI technologies enable companies to use past and present data assets to drive productivity and increase customer engagement, thus enabling better, faster, more accurate decision making capabilities. BI enables companies to extend data to dashboards and scorecards, and measure key performance indicators (KPIs). They can use analytics to make intelligent assumptions so that they can build predictive models and identify new opportunities. Using 1KEY BI, companies can create more effective marketing campaigns and measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.

Benefits for business users

Increase customer retention and purchase frequency, Determine key factors that drive loyalty and use that insight to increase overall loyalty program effectiveness. Improve profitability by identifying and targeting the highest value customers. Identify profitability drivers and factors that change customer behavior. Analyze data to ensure that your most valuable customers are properly rewarded. Retain valuable customers. Generate quality demand at the lowest cost. Improve profits earned from customers. Reduce wasted spend. Manage marketing like a science and less as an art. Increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, while decreasing costs. Maximize customer value by increasing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Monitor channel usage, costs

Benefits for IT department

Reduce implementation cost and risk with integrated analytic solutions.  Integrate data from multiple sources within the enterprise and across the value chain. Adapt to changing external and internal needs by leveraging, not replacing, existing investments. Reduce the burden on IT resources with comprehensive user self-service capabilities. Deliver better business results and rapid time to value.

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Today’s global competition adds a complex component to FMCG/CPG market with increased consolidation and competition in trade, new growth opportunities and sales channels, and critical necessity for efficient supply chain and cost optimization.

Added to the change in industry dynamics, FMCG/CPG companies are also dealing with rising consumer expectations of increasingly customized product offerings delivered through an increasing number of channels.

Such organizations face constant challenge of juggling expanding product portfolios, managing multifaceted supply chain with distinct service requirements and ensuring compliance with strict regulations and reporting requirements. This industry is reliant on accurate, timely market research, effective, targeted marketing campaigns and an efficient distribution network and sales force to execute the enterprise strategy and achieve targets and plans.

Business and Information Access Challenges for FMCG / CPG

• Optimizing spend – is difficult to achieve due to multiple ERP instances, which do not allow consolidation of supplier and sourcing knowledge to target quality suppliers and identify problem sources for tainted products
• Rapid new product innovation – is essential to win over consumers. Nothing lifts revenues like a new product or the extension of a successful existing product line, but organizations are hampered by the inability to analyze ad hoc market groups and consumer feedback to identify new product, market, and pricing opportunities
• Improving sales and marketing effectiveness – as the rate of new store openings and growth in shelf space has peaked. Acquiring a complete perspective of marketing programs and go-to-market opportunities is required to enhance placement and promotion decisions is essential & avoid decline in effectiveness of advertising
• Integration of various data sources – Did the recent Ad campaign result in higher average shopper purchase from the retail shelves? Such insights can be obtained only with integrated data sources
• Evaluation of various scenarios – while decision making is tedious. Assessment of various scenarios is needed to decide on a particular action to be taken by an operational manager. For e.g., if brand manager changes amount of money spent on advertisements, what would be the impact on sales? To help the brand manager here, advanced analytics comes into picture
• Every user has a set of favorite reports – Most of the transactional applications (ERP/SCM) have a standard set of reports which are not sufficient. Customization would require programming / approaching the application vendor
• Decision making across enterprise is based on individual judgments – At present decisions taken for any issue that arises in the enterprises is completely dependent on various individual judgments based on gut-feel or understanding that individual receives. What organizations need is guided decision making or uniform decision making for each problem based on the organization’s expectation, and not decisions based on individuals’ expectations
• Supply chain visibility – Organizations are discovering that high product volume sales come at the expense of extreme data complexity.  Meanwhile, they struggle to maintain open lines of communication with their retail customers and distributors in order to manage the upstream flow of product.  These issues are not specific to the IT department: line-of-business managers in marketing, sales, manufacturing, and procurement, among others, must derive tangible business value from this quagmire of data and generate a healthy flow of information throughout the value chain

Why Business Intelligence (BI)?

In the face of all the complexities mentioned above, business users across the enterprise need better tools to plan, manage, measure, and improve strategic, financial, and operational performance.

Business Intelligence (BI) comes to the rescue of such organizations to compete in this environment, and deliver quality and value with every shipment and for every customer. As with every industry vertical, there is some uniqueness to FMCG/CPG market.  BI can have a very positive impact on organizations in these industries.

FMCG/CPG organizations confront the above challenges gravitate towards BI to create better visibility, drive performance and deliver product more efficiently.  Companies should deliver BI to business managers so as to better manage fluctuating product demand.

BI for FMCG/CPG is a critical enabler and the ‘brain’ behind the automated decisions, which allows business users to quickly evaluate exceptions and execute the remaining process activities through process intelligence, limiting human involvement to exceptions which includes Revenue Optimization, Direct Marketing Campaigns and Automated Replenishment.

BI helps develop new ways to become more consumer-driven to stay ahead in the competition, while further establishing a foundation for profitable growth.

BI supports organization growth, ensures success of the FMCG/CPG companies, and simplifies the process of managing competitive strategy, supply chain, product distribution and other critical business factors.

Business Insights and Analysis for FMCG / CPG

• Executive Analysis
• Sales Order Performance Analysis
• Product Performance Analysis
• Region Wise Analysis
• Sales office Performance Analysis
• Financial Analytics for greater ROCE -  Working Capital Optimization (C2C Cycle) (Debtor / Payables Analytics,  Inventory Optimization), Treasury Cash Analysis
• Customer Analytics – Trade Promotion Analytics, Outlet performance, Channel Analysis,  Integrated Consumer Demand & market performance visibility
• Supply Chain Analytics – Supply Chain Performance Management, Product Cost & profitability analysis, Operational Planning efficiency Inventory visibility & optimization, Supply Network efficiency, Spend Analytics
• Operations Analytics – Plant Performance Management, MES Analytics
• Financial and Operational Performance Analysis – allows meet goals and track progress, using information integrated from numerous enterprise systems and sources. Users can monitor financial health of organisation and create and share reports to comply with government and industry regulations
• Profitability Analysis – helps users to evaluate the competition, the market, analyse risk trends and forecast profitability with dependable data
• Sales and Marketing Analysis – BI provides ample support to establish and manage the results of marketing campaigns, market research, sales results and targets, individual sales performance, regional and product sales performance
• Distribution Channels Analysis – Team can monitor and analyse the efficiency of the distribution network and its impact on customer satisfaction, inventory, sales and other factors
• Divisional Sales Analysis – empowers the strength of decision makers for forecasting of sales. It visualizes divisional (like namkeen, pasta, sweets, bakery) sales performance analysis, Expense Analysis with extensive power of forecasting. User can forecast quantizes of divisions by using what-if Analysis on Sales, which is very useful for production planning. It also shows Divisional quarter wise region wise profitability analysis, sales revenue analysis and quantity sold analysis. User is getting all the related and useful information at single screen with details analysis.
• Material Consumption Analysis – enhances the power of decision making of business users. Users are getting all the information related to material consumption at one place on just one single click. He can view top 5 selling materials, Low 5 selling Materials, Low 5 selling Materials Mix and top 3 profitable materials for all sales channel distribution as well as for different sales channel distribution(Channel sales, Direct sales, Agent consigned Sales, Inter Company Sales Institutional Sales). It also visualizes three fast moving products with comparison of last year sales revenue, Which is very useful for business users to predict the product performance according to demand.
• Product Order vs. Delivery – Information contains Order placed by customers vs. Delivery information with trends, Alerts and comparative analysis. This Analytics contains three parts. First part having month wise comparative analysis with detail drill down information for delivery done(%) and average delivery time with alerts and benchmark. Second part contains top customers Information with order placed analysis and Trend Analysis. Last part visualizes the monthly public vs. private Order placed with variance analysis. So users are getting all the information on single analytics with interactive and Graphical View, which empowers the strength of decision makers to take better decisions very quickly and with 100 % accuracy.
  

Beneficiaries of BI

Who inside the FMCG/CPG organization would benefit from such a solution? Obvious choice would be Marketing, Brand Management and Sales functions which need external data sources for their operations. There are other functions which would be majorly impacted by these solutions like Research and Development (R&D) and Warehousing and Procurement, to name a few. But historically, Marketing, Brand Management and so on have been the least automated, hence there might not be much understanding and appreciation among the managers of these functions for enterprise wide data integration BI Platform. So it’s the CIO who has to shoulder the responsibility of championing such a solution. The solution benefits the CIO by enhancing value of IT in the eyes of the business. Data Integration of various disparate sources may well be last frontier that IT has to conquer inside the CPG Organization.

Various roles within FMCG/CPG and their information interest:

• Marketing and Sales VP: Interested in cross-selling, up-selling, improving customer intelligence and sale, campaign and promotion performance
• Category Manager/Brand Manager: Interested in the specific details about brands and categories of products.  Responsible for increasing the sales around a category/brand of product.  Also seek information about shelf placement/optimization and promotions
• CIO: Interested in integration, total cost of ownership, ability to execute, ease of use, ability to meet the demands of the business.  Should be interested in how to achieve the results the other business leaders are interested in
• CFO: Interested in accurate analysis of profitability.  Profitability by brand, category, customer, product.   Interested in time to value and increasing margins
• VP of Supply Chain: Interested in the deep analysis of inventory turns, supply chain effectiveness, vendor quality and performance, overall decreasing every penny from the supply chain

BI can answer to the following questions business users at FMCG/CPG companies are asking?

• Who are my most profitable customers?
• How can I optimize my pricing structure?
• How can I analyze inventory turns to improve sales?
• How can I predict customer buying patterns?
• How can I improve the data quality of my customer information and therefore reduce costs and improve customer value?
• How can I analyze the effectiveness of my promotions?
• How can I improve the efficiency of my supply chain?

BI can provide deep analysis and answers to these questions and more.  This allows for organizations to make informed decisions about the business in order to improve operations and effectively improve the top and bottom lines.

BI can be a decision-enabling platform for multiple stakeholders who have differing views of the business across the organization.

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Each organization can define their goals related to data governance. Some basic common goals are:

1. Increasing consistency and confidence in decision making
2. Maximizing the income generation potential of data
3. Designating accountability for information quality
4. Improving data security
5. Decreasing the risk of regulatory fines
6. Acknowledge and hold all gains
7. Enable better planning by supervisory staff
8. Minimizing or eliminating re-work
9. Optimize staff effectiveness
10. Establish process performance baselines to enable improvement efforts

Governing data today is an organizational responsibility, and there is clearly a need for common solutions and governance models to protect and share data on different levels across the organization. Moreover, the complexity extends beyond structured customer data. Organizations are concerned about governing access to many types of data including unstructured content, trade secrets, financial data, patient information, video, audio, etc. Beyond new methods to protect data, effective data governance can play a vital role in driving new business opportunities and retaining existing customers by improving overall data quality and business intelligence. Companies seeking to get a true handle on their data must go beyond simply protecting it.

Steps to a successful data governance process are as follows:

a)    Select right people for right job: The first step to successful data governance is to select/find an individual who carries the delegated authority and making the person accountable to carry out all the required activities. Team need to be selected appropriately. All stakeholders need to be brought together with a consensus about the activities to be carried out.

b)   Take a note of the situation: Organization processes and practices need to be reviewed. It helps benchmark where the organization’s data-governance program is today and delivers a road map to determine where it will be tomorrow.

c)    Develop a data-governance strategy: After assessment about company’s current level of data governance, data governance team should lay a plan for next few years on how the company will increase its level of data governance. Plan designed should be relevant and realistic in terms of goals to be achieved within a stipulated deadline and also set key performance indicators to track progress.

d)    Calculate value of data: If you want to calculate the value of your data, build an internal marketplace for data based on user entitlements and the utility of IT services. When everyone in an organization is paying for IT services and data directly, the value of data is part of the business P&L.

e)   Calculate probability of risk: Past history about usage of data can help determine how data might be compromised and disclosed in the future. Every organization has records of transaction which are unused. Collecting it, relating its meaning and studying loss trends over time can help any organization transform risk management into a fact-based, business intelligence method for analyzing past events, forecasting future losses and changing current policy requirements to improve your mitigation strategies.

f)     Monitor the process: The goals which have been set, the task which has been laid down and work that needs to be done has to be monitored on continuous basis. Data governance is largely about organizational behavior. Organizations change every day, and therefore their data, its value and risk also shift rapidly. Unfortunately, most organizations assess themselves only once a year. Data governance is much more than simple security, compliance or risk management. It’s all of them and more. It’s about how an organization uses data to benefit and protect itself.

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MAIA Intelligence demonstrates best-in-class capability and BI market leadership through demonstrated technology success and customer commitment.

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India — February, 22, 2012— MAIA Intelligence Pvt. Ltd., today announced it has attained a Gold Independent Software Vendor and Business Intelligence competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment and distinguishing itself within the top 1 percent of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise, and then designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. They also must submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects (along with implementing a yearly customer satisfaction study), meet a revenue commitment, and pass technology and/or sales assessments.

MAIA Intelligence, with its team of technocrats offers products in BI space on Microsoft technology. MAIA’s vision to democratize BI from experts few to masses has now become reality with its 1KEY software solutions. Attaining the Microsoft Business Intelligence competency demonstrates MAIA Intelligence’s expertise in designing, developing and implementing business intelligence solutions that allow customers to monitor, analyze and plan business performance based on actionable business insight. Equipped with exclusive training, the latest software, and support on solutions around Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Microsoft Visio 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, partners help their customers set their organization apart from the competition.

“This Microsoft Gold ISV and BI competency showcases our expertise in and commitment to today’s Business Intelligence technology market and demonstrates our deep knowledge of Microsoft and its products,” said Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence. “We plan to accelerate our customers’ success by providing BI technology for their business demands.”

“By achieving a gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “These partners have a deep expertise that puts them in the top 1 percent of our partner ecosystem, and their proficiency will help customers drive innovative solutions on the latest Microsoft technology.”

Attaining the Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV)/Software competency demonstrates MAIA Intelligence’s expertise in developing applications based on Microsoft solutions. Equipped with exclusive training, the latest software, and support on Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows 7 and Microsoft cloud services, these partners are equipped to develop innovative solutions to meet their customers’ needs.

The Microsoft Partner Network helps partners strengthen their capabilities to showcase leadership in the marketplace on the latest technology, to better serve customers and, with 640,000 Microsoft partners in their ecosystem, to easily connect with one of the most active, diverse networks in the world.

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We invite you to write and participate for BI blog, give your viewpoint to the visitors and become a guest author. Choose a topic that can well fit in any of these categories: BI, emerging trends, CIO community, Entrepreneurship. View Points & Perspective. Leverage your thought leadership in BI domain through this platform and create your identity on this medium by contributing your views.

Blog, once ignored by mainstream business & technology professional, because of their proliferation & the ubiquitous & free flow nature of the discussion that occurs on them make these online journals an effective channel for meaningful discussion around important enterprise IT business issues.

BI blog has become the hub for most comprehensive compilation of enterprise level corporate IT content, including information on emerging BI software trends, events and knowledge, Challenges, vendor commentary, compliance considerations and other areas of interest to both global and Indian companies, technology professionals and industry constituents.

BI Blog is managed by MAIA Intelligence, BI and XBRL software product company. The number of subscribers, blog comments, links to blog posts, and the number of times a post is shared in other social media are indicators of a blog’s popularity, potential influence, and reach.

This blog is rich repository of great articles related to BI, CIO community, Emerging Trends, Entrepreneurship and with various view points and perspective. It also provides great insights on MAIA Intelligence products, technology, success and culture. The contribution in the blog has been by good amount of industry experts as guest authors too besides the thought leaders in MAIA Intelligence. BI blog has over 446 rich articles shared and with hundrends of comments by visitors since 2007 onwards.

You need not be an expert blogger. All you have to do is visit http://blog.maia-intelligence.com/submit-a-post/ to submit your article. You are also invited to post your comments on Blog!

We would be glad to have you as a guest author and your contribution.

Happy intelligent blogging !!!

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All along till now, Organizations were using business application to get the information from the vast amount of data buried into various internal systems. But this is just information & decision makers had the reactive approach to deal with such situations e.g. North region is not meeting the revenue targets – so create some focused program to cover North region & so on.

This is where Business Analytics play !! Its not reporting of past data or what is happening now, but giving organizations the forward look at the business.

It can answers questions like :

how do we get more insights about our customers?
what if we change the price or service of the products ?
what will be the impact on our customers ?
How do we target our most profitable customers?
How do we detect frauds ?
which of the customers are likely to leave us in future?

Business Analytics is an extremely important area going across all the business domains. If you know in advance, which of the customers are likely to leave you, you can take measures to hit only those customers with right campaigns to retain them. there is no need for machine gun firing but a sniper is required in this case.

By looking at the future, Organizations can take proactive decisions and plan their business for maximum success.

So Business Intelligence can give you “Information” but Business Analytics gives you the “Knowledge” – TO ACT UPON !!!

In the next post I will talk about What is Business Analytics & its various components.

This article has been submitted by Sandeep Raut and he can be reached at rautsan at gmail dot com

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