Using Data to Improve and Grow Your Business

By Dr. Ashley T. Howes
2 September 2022

Does your business use data to monitor, track and improve itself?

For example:

Do you measure turnover / profit?
Do you measure sales performance, e.g. number of new customers?
Do you measure staff performance?
Do you know your most profitable customer segment?

Is this information at hand easily on dashboards which provide quick insight for relevant staff?

If not, you could be missing out as companies which use data analytics to improve their business performance gain a better chance of growing.

Here are the main steps to consider in using data to improve business:

What do you want to measure?
How will you collect the data?
How will you analyse the data?
How will you learn from the data?

What do you want to measure?

Data is everywhere these days, so it can sometimes be challenging to understand what's the most important things to monitor:

You need to measure what is most important to your business - your KPIs - Key Performance Indicators. These help you understand the performance of your business
KPIs are unique to your own business, so use the ones above as a start, but define your own as well
For example, perhaps you have smart sensors on customer installed equipment to alert you when predictive maintenance is required or other specific scenarios occur

How will you collect the data?

To collect the data, key things to consider include:

Can the data be collected digitally or it is a manual task?
Where will the data be stored? A central database, or in separate systems?
Is the data up-to-date?

How will you analyse the data?

To analyse the data, key things to consider include:

What format is the data in? Does it need to be adapted before analysis?
How will data from different sources be cross-referenced?
How will any reports by shown? Visually using graphs / counts on dashboards or more detailed?

How will you learn from the data?

To learn from the data and make sure things improve, key things to consider include:

Is it clear what is the analysis is telling you?
How often are the reports viewed and what actions are required? Who performs this action?
Analysis can be iterative. Is further analysis required?

Are you a business who is looking help in building a system to collect and analyse your business data? Please get in touch to see if we can help.

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