Consumer goods companies, particularly category management and shopper insights teams, deal with overwhelming amounts of data every day, ranging from the internally generated to retailer provided. With the CG industry becoming increasingly competitive, the ability to turn data into actionable insights is now a basic requirement to stay in the game. The question is no longer How can we collect data? but How can we most effectively analyze and report on this data?
Self-service BI is the best way to address this question as well as meet the goals of category management. However, it is not enough for a company to merely adopt a BI platform. According to industry experts, although many companies have self-service BI in place, two-thirds of them express that they’re struggling with it. Instead, its crucial to implement an effective BI platform. Consumer goods companies need to deliver the right tools to the right users; providing the same tool to users with different abilities will seriously compromise the effectiveness of self-service BI. Differentiate between the casual users and the power users, and then provide them with the appropriate tools. Typically casual users want an interactive tool to view the data, while power users look for authoring and analysis capabilities to tackle it. Different need sets required different tool sets it is critical to understand the differences.
An effective self-service BI platform today should address many areas including:
Productivity by decreasing turnaround time
Scalability by minimizing the need for training
Flexibility by providing users a tool they’re comfortable using
Predictability by performing real-time what-if analyses
The resources required to implement an effective self-service BI platform are considerable but well worth it and necessary if you expect your company prosper in the future.
Read the entire Outlook Report from CGT here.