New orders, enquiries, complaints, marketing campaigns: every day, companies have to cope with a huge flood of data. The growth of data volumes has accelerated in recent years and will become even faster due to the networking of machines, systems, end devices and people through the interconnection of IT and business. Big Data therefore means more than just being a buzzword or a marketing term used by software manufacturers.
You have data, ensure efficient evaluation and generate answers. In order to get a grip on the increasing volume of data, it is important to be clear about which data is important for your company in the first place?
A general distinction is certainly your customer structure as one criterion. Is your company active in the B2B or B2C market, or even both?
Do you really need real-time data that a potential customer is generating in the shop right this second? or is it enough to evaluate data generated by customers and machines that was generated in the recent past?
What do you want to generate with the data you have?
A targeted analysis and implementation of Big Data results in potential benefits for your company. These can be:
Nowadays, the speed and comparability of the analyses of the data is important. However, problems always arise because sales, production and service often still have different data for business transactions. When reports are generated in the context of business intelligence, they must be based on the same data for all company divisions and generated in real time. Through the use of Big Data, trend analyses as well as real-time data are available to the company in real time for any kind of use. This creates a new quality for your company.
Ensuring high data quality is crucial for Big Data analysis.
In the context of Big Data, master data and master data harmonisation are two of the most important points to work on. High quality data forms the basis for new business strategies, innovations and competitive advantages. High quality data significantly reduces the effort required to create value that matters to your customers.
Bringing together structured data through ERP systems and unstructured data through visit reports is a challenge worth tackling.
Example: A company employs 15 sales representatives who prepare three visit reports per day with an average of two pages. This means that 360 reports are written in one week with four field service days. Getting an overview of this amount of data is almost impossible. However, the use of big data software makes it possible to evaluate such unstructured data. This means that visit reports can be evaluated by robots and computer programmes.
The central storage of data with Big Data software can enable your company to save costs. By networking systems and software, for example, item data can be maintained centrally and made available to a wide variety of programmes. Also, say goodbye to time-consuming adjustments and updates of data in decentralised and different systems. Achieving time savings of more than 30% in data maintenance is not wishful thinking, but the result of a structured data creation and utilisation process. Independently of this, data quality can be increased enormously and costs reduced. This is a decisive competitive advantage when shop systems need to be fed with up-to-date information. It can be achieved that the data leads to sales faster and in high quality for use by customers.