Augmenting the ideal business moments with analytics

Real-time agility is crucial to not just survive but thrive in the digital economy. After all, organizations that can make data-led decisions quickly and respond to evolving events in real-time are in the best position to outcompete their rivals. Analytics are key here, and they can help support in-the-moment decisions that occur in your business.

Moving away from traditional BI

How can you optimize every business moment? By harnessing up-to-date, real-time information and analysis. With your people and your systems able to access this information quickly and efficiently, you can respond to events as they evolve.

But the passive nature of traditional business intelligence (BI) simply can’t support your needs in the digital economy. The preconfigured, historical datasets it provides are firmly stuck in the past, when you need the right information to respond in the present.

While traditional BI wasn’t designed to optimize real-time decision-making and actions, analytics and active intelligence are all about using relevant data to create in-the-moment awareness about what’s happening in your business.

To showcase how analytics can help you – and your team – augment the ideal business moments, here’s how one central Qlik location is now providing Urban Outfitters employees with up-to-the-minute data on all aspects of the individual store’s KPIs – so they can act on those insights immediately.

Boosting operational performance in-store

Urban Outfitters is a globally recognizable brand in the lifestyle retail space, yet they struggled with siloed systems and countless systems spread across 650 stores. Store reporting was time-consuming and usually based on old data, while the reports themselves were complex, difficult-to-understand documents that provided little to no motivation for employees to take action.

Recognizing this problem would only grow and continue to hamstring the brand as a whole, Urban Outfitters looked to implement two solutions: Qlik Data Integration to stream data into a Snowflake cloud, and Qlik Sense SaaS for data analysis.

Replacing gut-based decision-making with data-based decision-making

Ensuring your staff have real-time data to make timely decisions isn’t as easy as it sounds – particularly in a store like Urban Outfitters where floor staff can’t look at analytics dashboards on a desktop, or walk around the store with a folder full of documents. Instead, storefront managers need to be given the power of insights that could then flow downstream to everyone in each store.

Now, data resides in a single cloud-based repository where it is easily accessible to all staff.

The team has access to highly visual dashboards that are quick to create and easy to understand, including alerts and embedded insights in their store workflow processes so staff have real-time data access that then boosts store performance, since information is available when they need it and in a natural way.

In any organization, you need to identify the business moments where people are making decisions with data without even realizing that data will make them more accurate. Rather than relying on a ‘gut feeling’, now you can utilize analytics to make more consistent, more predictable and more accurate decisions to create the most ideal outcomes every time.

About the author:

As the Executive Vice President of Strategic Clients at Qlik, I lead a multi-disciplinary team that blends sales, value engineering and consulting services. My teams advise strategic clients on their digital and data transformational strategies for large enterprise customers to maximize the value of their overall investments in data, and in Qlik’s data integration and analytics platforms. If you would like to discuss how your organization can start leveraging the full value of your data, please feel free to get in touch with me at [email protected].