Six Errors Companies will continue to make if not corrected

Mistake 1: Taking Existing Customers for Granted
You can use data integration and cleansing tools to bring together infor?mation from disparate sources. dash?boards and visualization tools help make data accessible, providing visibility into customer trends. what can you do with business intelligence tools like these? As an example, for each major customer or customer segment, you can analyze multiple scenarios to find an approach that builds on existing relationships and increases your share of each customer's wallet. You might decide to extend credit or develop creative payment plans for your most important customers. or analyze customer satisfaction scores to identify areas where improvement is needed, such as product quality or customer service - ensuring that profit?able customers stay happy and loyal. .

Mistake 2: Failing to Capitalize on Market Opportunities
Even with limited investment funds, you still have to make fact-based decisions about short-and long-term opportunities to grow top-line revenues - whether you're trying to expand into new markets or extend a successful product line. many great brands were launched dur?ing recessionary times and yet able to capitalize on unique market opportunities. To invest in and seize market opportu?nities with confidence, you need a solution that helps you see trends and variances, analyze scenarios, and select the right combination of initiatives to maximize your returns.

To inform the right decisions, you need simple, intuitive ad hoc reporting and analysis. A business intelligence solution should support interactive exploration across multiple dimensions of your business and let you create queries using business-friendly language. what-if analysis allows you to model the operational and financial impact of multiple scenarios on revenue, costs, and cash flow - to understand the results of each market opportunity before you act on it. Layer on risk assessment to determine the range of potential out?comes for each opportunity and add economic analysis to select and priori?tize promising scenarios. The result? You have the hard facts to back up the investment decisions that drive sales, cash flow, and operational efficiency.

Mistake 3: Allowing Operational Inefficiencies to Persist
To keep the cost of delivering goods and services in line, you must continu?ally find ways to reduce waste and eliminate inefficiencies. if operational wastefulness persists, you can lose control of your cost structures - and that puts pressure on your gross mar?gins. economic woes and restricted cash flows are forcing companies to analyze cost structures by delving deeper into the information already at their fingertips. Because of this, analysts point to a rising interest in business intelligence software.

Even if your gross margins are better than average, expenses may be high. For example, Thomson found that leading companies carefully manage expenses in sales and marketing and r & d to deliver a consistent cash flow-positive business across all types of market cycles. The best-run public companies that generated the highest market values, as they grew from $30 million to a billion in revenue, typically exceeded 10% earnings-before-interest-and?depreciation (eBiTdA) margin. Take a lesson from the highest-growth com?panies: sell value to maximize gross margins, contain expenses to deliver a cash flow-positive business, and reinvest to fuel growth..

Mistake 4: Letting Problems Go Undiagnosed and Uncorrected
In today's business environment, an organization needs to address all outstanding issues - but you must first identify and prioritize existing problems, then focus your time and energy on the most crucial. no organization wants to wait until a product is drastically behind schedule or a department significantly over budget before taking action. How?ever, if you manually track project or program status, you risk not only wast?ing time and money on an ineffective approach but also delaying your ability to identify and then correct problems. As Thomson notes, "Leaders of expo?nential growth companies utilize a systematic approach to problem solving." during down market cycles, these companies identified and eliminated problems and then worked to optimize their business. For example, these companies found ways to streamline processes, reduce headcount in selective areas, and invest in systems and IT infrastructure to improve customer management or market intelligence.

Mistake 5: Driving the Wrong Behavior in the Organization
If your corporate goals aren't clearly defined, communicated, and measured, you're missing out on an opportunity to encourage beneficial behaviors. You may improve performance in one department or division at the expense of overall company performance. Gartner suggests that organizations "show how performance management efforts will benefit the enterprise if metrics and reporting align to corporate goals.

You need a solution that supports greater alignment, accountability, and performance at both the individual and the corporate level. integrated and transparent software solutions make it more likely that employees will trust the data and understand how daily actions affect business goals. But companies often find their strategic initiatives disconnected from daily operational goals, leaving employees confused about indi?vidual priorities. By clearly assigning accountability for goals and timelines, you can communicate explicit perfor?mance expectations throughout the company and develop incentives that drive needed cultural and behavioral changes.

Mistake 6: Failing to Offer Transparency for Stakeholders
The global economic crisis is leading business stakeholders and governments to demand greater transparency into company finances, retirement plans, pension plans operations, decisions, and core performance metrics. However, many organizations find that overly complex reporting hampers their ability to demonstrate compliance or fiscal health. According to Gartner analyst Bill Hostmann, "most organizations find they do not have the information, processes, and tools needed by their managers to make informed, responsive decisions. Too many enterprises under-invest in their information infrastructure and business users tools."

Business intelligence solutions make it easy to share critical business informa?tion across internal business functions and with external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, partners, and investors. A complete business intelli?gence solution supports the entire range of enterprise reporting - periodic, highly detailed reports that give insight into overall business performance and pro?vide increased reporting transparency for all stakeholders. The result is increased trust and stronger collaboration at all levels, inside and outside the business.

Tough economic conditions require companies to go beyond slashing costs and retiring workers. With the retirement group aging now is the time to build efficient, high-performance organizations based on a coherent foundation of information. Organizations must take must create netbenefits and have a global view of critical information if they wish to move from just reacting to economic challenges and instead position themselves for future competitive advantage.

Are you making the most of your business information? use this quick netbenefits assessment to determine whether a business intelligence solution can improve your organization's decision making and, ultimately, its performance.