A Lot More Business Insight, A Little Less Gut Instinct
January 23rd, 2010 | Alex BrownOne Essential Key to Having a Banner 2010
What makes a good manager great? For ages, many believed it was an intangible and immeasurable gut instinct that made strong business leaders visionaries. A manager that took risks by “going with his gut” or “trusting her instincts” had more than moxie, but also a better performance record to go along with it.
While there is always a role for instinct in business, history and measurement have found that sound and timely business information will outdo a sixth sense any day of the week. Take for example the IBM Global Business Services study and report, “Business analytics and optimization for the intelligent enterprise.” The study of more than 400 high and low performing business enterprises showed again and again that top performing businesses are more effectively tapping into timely business data and analytics to improve decision making and business operations. Below are just a few of the outcomes from the study and its executive report, which you can read in full here.
- In the study, organizations that had analytic programs that were “well underway” were found to be more than three times as skilled at using information to understand risk (and twice as skilled in using that information to predict outcomes) than businesses that did not make analytics a priority.
- Top performing businesses are “twice as skilled as low performing businesses when it comes to extracting and prioritizing relevant information.“
- Top performing businesses were found to be “three times better at applying information for more predictable outcomes, which gives them the opportunity to better anticipate, navigate and handle contingencies.“
This clear link between top performance and the smart use of timely data and analytics across a business organization is irrefutable. In fact, it’s becoming a calling card for success as leading businesses make good, actionable information a main driver of business strategy and competitive advantage.
For the foodservice industry, there has never been a better or more important time to embrace the masses of business data provided by the supply chain and convert it into useful, actionable information. Eating habits are changing and attracting the American consumer will be harder than ever. The peak year for dining out in America was 2001, according to Harry Balzer, senior vice president and chief industry analyst with the market research firm NPD Group. Since then, people have been eating more of their meals at home, ending a five decade trend in which Americans frequented restaurants at ever-increasing rates. After a decade at the mercy of global fluctuations in commodity and fuel pricing, a brutal recession and falling restaurant traffic, foodservice businesses need to make most of 2010 and the decade it rings in. It must become an era of embracing business intelligence in order to radically improve decision making, efficiency and business performance results. Confident in the value that analytics can bring to the foodservice industry, ArrowStream has greatly expanded its Performance Management capabilities. Our mission is to put critical business information at the fingertips of CFOs and procurement executives. Aggregating spending, inventory, purchasing, volume and contract data from across the supply chain, ArrowStream’s performance management dashboards give foodservice industry leaders an astonishing, new and real-time perspective on costs and vendor performance.
With the analytical tools performance management provides, CFOs across the industry finally have a simple, flexible system for accurately comparing supply chain trading partner performance and costs. Rather than trusting that a vendor’s costs are low based on price sheets, business leaders can benchmark trading partners in real time to see exactly what is spent and where. This invaluable data can be used to make the very best purchasing and partnership decisions as “best in class provider” becomes a title trading partners must earn rather than a designation assumed by gut feeling.
Today ArrowStream’s Performance Management Module offers dashboards for Total Landed Costs, Spend Analytics, Inventory Volume Tracking and Market Basket. By the end of 2010, additional dashboards for key functions, such as budget analysis, cost control, inventory, promotion and contract management will be added to the system. To learn more about ArrowStream performance management tools and how they can expand and optimize the ways businesses measure company and trading partner performance, I invite you to click here.
A new decade has come and it’s the perfect time to shake things up for the better. Here’s to 2010, a decade ArrowStream is certain can be one of smarter supply chain management, meaningful business analytics and new standards of excellence across the foodservice industry.