With mounting amounts of complex data and increasing economic pressures on strategic planning, companies are faced with the challenge of organizing, accessing and analyzing information in a way that is useful across their businesses.
So how do companies including Nike, Fifth Third, First Energy and Abbot Nutrition keep their employees on the same page?
They turn to Balanced Insight, a Cincinnati-based business intelligence (BI) software company founded by Tom Hammergren that’s transforming the way companies use data to manage their business and make decisions.
“Information drives our economy today, but, let’s face it, huge amounts of it can be confusing to deal with,” says Hammergren. “Product lifecycle management, customer relationships and day-to-day operations — the success of all internal and external functions of the business of these processes is highly contingent on information and collaboration.”
Today, however, there remains a disconnect between company IT departments and the business. Harnessing and delivering clear information to the right people can be labor-intensive and costly, especially if there is no cross-project collaboration or common understanding. A recent report by Forrester Research found that 49 percent of business intelligence stakeholders don’t think their current BI efforts are flexible enough to react quickly to constantly changing industry demands.
For instance, the CFO of a large company might tell employees he wants to see a 5 percent increase in the bottom line. For the controller, that could mean a 5 percent cut in costs; for the vice president of sales, it could mean a 5 percent increase in sales; and for the vice president of accounting, it could mean a 5 percent increase in net income. They all see a 5 percent increase differently. They might not even define basic metrics – like “revenue” or “operating costs” – in exactly the same way.
There is a growing need for intelligence platforms that can adjust to evolving information and communication demands, and more quickly provide tools for performance measurement and analysis. This new market has been called “agile business intelligence”— and Balanced Insight at the forefront of the emerging space.
Agile BI is all about reducing the time and resources required to develop the analytical tools executives and managers need to track performance and run the business.
“We worked with a large Fortune 500 energy and utilities provider to change the bonus structure of the company,” Hammergren said. “They had a project team of 10 people working 3,200 combined hours over two months and still hadn’t found a solution. After they came to us, we nailed it with four people working 350 hours in a week—and shaved $21 million off their balance sheet.”
Compared to many older or “legacy” business intelligence packages, Balanced Insight’s Consensus platform is flexible. It complements the technology a business already uses by automating data organization and opening collaboration between multiple users and projects. That leads to quicker testing of prototypes and clear outputs that are easier for everyone in an organization to interpret and use. The result is a versatile business intelligence solution that reduces repetitive processes, increases semantic consistency and delivers better interfaces for end-users.
According to Hammergren, Balanced Insight is like the GPS of data. It keeps everyone on the same path to help businesses solve problems and reach their goals faster. A big part of their strategy is being the “white knight” for companies that need quick help. Its 100 percent customer renewal rate demonstrates the market need for such an approach.
Balanced Insight’s Consensus works for any business with data comprehension and storage issues, from consumer-packaged goods to human services. The benefits range from cutting internal costs to increasing profit margin by exploring the supply chain side of loyalty marketing or cross-correlating cost and promotion between like product and like consumer segments.
“There is a growing gap between supply and demand that we’re closing with automation,” says Hammergren. “If a business is promoting a product with a coupon, we are looking at how it affects sales, shipment and processing costs of both the promoted and non-promoted items to maximize the effect of future promotions.”
Next, Balanced Insight will be seeking solutions for vertical problems inside organizations by creating end-user collaborative experiences, connecting the strategy driven by executives of a company with the tactics executed by the employees, for a full-scale comprehensive look at the way a business operates.
“We want to change the landscape of business intelligence, with a more user-centric and business-driven approach,” says Hammergren. “By building an ecosystem that allows everyone to participate, we are connecting all the dots between the strategy and day-to-day operation of an organization to improve the way businesses work to reach their goals.”
For more information: www.balancedinsight.com
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