Securing quick wins and rapid ROI from your Business Intelligence (B.I.) and Performance Management Initiatives.
I managed to make it to the 2nd Obis Omni forum of 2009 today in Bloomsbury, London. Obis have elected to move away from last year’s two day conference format in favour of a single day (run twice along similar lines). They say this is due to the economic climate and the difficulties many of their members voices in escaping from the office for two days. From a purely personal perspective I missed the multi day format, as I found it provided better opportunities for sharing knowledge with the other B.I. That said, the first day in September was great value, and the sessions I attended at the second session were equally valuable.
I should say at this stage that I had been invited run the session on “establishing a performance management culture that creates competitive advantage through getting decision making into the hands of more end users” along with Chris Field and Steve Lockwood of Infor.
There were two plenary case studies on offer to start the day: Simon Skipworth (SSP) and James Morgan (O2) both discussing why “business intelligence, corporate performance management and performance optimisation are key to surviving in this volatile and uncertain economy”. I elected to attend the former as Simon had implemented Infor technology and I was keen to hear his experiences first hand.
SSP manage food and beverage brands in travel locations (train stations, airports) from the likes of Marks and Spencer, Starbucks and a wide selection of their own brands. They make heavy use of SQL Server for data warehousing with Office Plus and Application studio delivering information back to the business.
Simon spoke around two key themes, namely “doing things better” and “Making things leaner” during his presentation. Whilst some of the data supported core retail activities, for example identifying profitable activity, optimising staffing and customer surveys there were more surprising applications. Simon explained that combating till fraud was one of the greatest challenges in a fast moving retail environment. He went on to demonstrate how easy it was to spot fraud using statistics to analysis unusual behaviour and how successful their revenue assurance team was as a result of B.I.
A healthy round of Q & A followed mainly centred around delivery, cost savings and development strategy. It was positive to start the day looking at a successful project that had and continued to achieve it’s aims.
More to follow on “Data Quality; unlocking the potential of your data to reveal quick wins or areas for achieving rapid payback”
