In today’s business world, going by your “gut” and making split-second decisions are not sustainable strategies. With all of the technology at our avail, smart organizations are leveraging the power of data-driven decision-making across their operations. In return, these companies are reducing risk, improving accuracy, enhancing efficiency, saving money, and gaining a strong competitive advantage in their respective fields.
Defined as the process of using data to inform your decision-making process and validate a course of action before committing to it, data-driven decision making can take different forms depending on the company and its goals. Harvard Business School offers these examples of business use cases for data-driven decision making:
- Collecting survey responses to identify products, services, and features customers would like.
- Conduct user testing to observe how customers are inclined to use a product or services and to identify potential issues that should be resolved prior to a full product release.
- Launch a new product or service in a test market in order to test the waters and understand how a product might perform in that specific market.
- Analyze shifts in demographic data to determine business opportunities or threats.
What is Data-Driven Decision Making?
At its core, data-driven decision-making allows for a better understanding of business needs by leveraging real, verified data, instead of just making assumptions. “As human beings, we often make split-second decisions based on feeling and intuition, without taking the outcome or consequence into account,” Devan Grant writes in What is Data-Driven Decision Making? “But, when it comes to making business decisions, it is crucial to take all external factors into account before taking any decisive action.”
That’s where technology platforms like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) come in. By serving as a single source of truth for all of an organization’s data, an ERP like NetSuite makes it easier to access, review, analyze and draw conclusions from that data. Modern ERP platforms also feature robust reporting and analytics dashboards that decision-makers can use to visualize and explore data; track metrics; identify trends; and analyze performance across departments.
“By analyzing ERP data, a business can identify patterns, trends and anomalies, and use this information to optimize its operations, improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase profitability,” NetSuite’s David Luther points out. “For example, ERP analytics can help a company identify which products are selling well, which suppliers are providing the best value and which business processes are causing delays or inefficiencies. ERP analytics also helps the business more accurately forecast future trends.”
How NetSuite Supports Data-Driven Decisions
NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Analytics and Reporting capabilities provide real-time visibility into company operational and financial performance across all business functions. Prebuilt and customizable, these reports and analyses make it easy for companies to get the data they need, while role-based dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs) track business performance.
SuiteAnalytics provides fast access to the data necessary to gain meaningful insight into financial and operational performance across multiple subsidiaries, departments, and teams. With its library of customizable reports, NetSuite’s Financial and Operational Reporting capabilities streamline reporting processes and improve communications.
Once in place, NetSuite helps companies solve problems like:
- Multiple spreadsheets and too many data silos. With all financial and operational data centralized, time needed to consolidate and reconcile information is eliminated.
- Inefficient manual reporting. NetSuite’s prebuilt, industry-standard reports plus no-code customization capabilities get business users the information they need quickly.
- Poor visibility into business performance. With NetSuite, you can incorporate business performance metrics into all data dashboards and KPIs.
Last year, NetSuite extended its Analytics Warehouse platform in order to help users get even faster value from their data. It says the latest updates will help organizations improve data management, quickly build analyses to increase efficiencies and reduce costs, gain a better understanding of their customers, and leverage data to innovate and grow faster.
"Organizations need to make sense of the vast volumes of data they create, and that can often be an extremely complex and time-consuming task," said Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite, in a press release. "Creating a single source of truth and applying the latest advancements in AI help NetSuite users quickly unlock value from their data and turn it into a business advantage that drives growth."
The latest updates to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse provide:
- Analytics embedded in user dashboards: Users can now add links to important and frequently-used visualizations from NetSuite Analytics Warehouse to NetSuite dashboards.
- More frequent data refreshes: New data pipeline settings give NetSuite users more current insights into their financial, sales, and inventory activity.
- Enhanced financial data analysis: The new financial analysis subject area helps companies analyze financial activity from different angles and incorporate more business systems data to identify areas for P&L improvement.
- Deeper insights. Conduct analysis below summary level into key revenue-impacting subject areas like sales order and inventory activity.
- Improved user access management: New Single Sign-On simplifies user authentication with a single logon to NetSuite and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse.
As a NetSuite Alliance Partner, Vursor helps companies across various industries unlock the value of the ERP as a leading analytics platform. By eliminating data silos, streamlining data integration and providing robust reporting and analytics, NetSuite helps companies unlock the full potential of their enterprise platform and change data into actionable insights that can be turned into sustainable success.