Typically, businesses use data to make informed decisions, to investigate issues, and for exploratory purposes such as finding new growth opportunities. However, did you know that data can be taken a step further and be integrated into your day-to-day business operations to help you run your business smoothly?
Instead of helping people make better decisions, it’s about using data-driven systems and algorithms to improve processes. For example, you can use data to automatically identify manufacturing defects, optimize delivery routes, target the right customer, or even detect fraud.
Here’s an eight-step process to use data to optimize your business operations!
Most of the time, companies look at their existing data sources such as sales records and customer information to get business insights. Although it’s a great starting point, it’s important to understand that there are many more data sources out there that can provide useful information.
There are two ways to source additional data: internal and external. Internal data is all the data about your business captured by your own business systems and processes. They include information about a company’s performance such as sales data, employee information, and customer records, and all the data captured by your day-to-day business activities. External data sources include all the data available outside your company that may be relevant to your business. They may be free sources available publicly or paid ones provided by third-party vendors.
Integrating new data sources into your business systems will require investing in tools that allow you to collect, store, and analyze data to improve operational performance. Also, consider the potential costs of not integrating these data sources into your business and being left behind.
If you’re going to use data to run your daily business operations, then it’s essential that you own it. Ensure that data gathering and storage is a core part of your business processes and systems. Wherever possible, at least, own the data that is critical for your business operations to run smoothly. Otherwise, they’ll be adversely affected when you’re unable to access data or face data issues — which brings me to the next point.
If you’re sourcing operational data that spans various systems and processes, then you’re going to end up with big data sets. So, it’s important to think about how you’re going to store and manage your data before you begin using it.
