In today's economy, relying on conventional approaches to drive growth is likely to yield merely ordinary (read: unsatisfactory) results. To deliver the extraordinary results that stakeholders now expect, company leaders must consider more innovative approaches to supporting enterprise growth. One critical strategy is to identify and exploit business improvement opportunities.

Often hidden or simply unrecognized, business improvement opportunities can be found in companies in every industry. Once understood, these opportunities can drive new ideas, creative thinking and pioneering practices. By boosting operational efficiencies, savings and revenues, they can hold the key to enterprise growth.

Seeing the possibilities
How can companies learn to recognize and take advantage of business improvement opportunities? Technologies such as data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) are essential. Long appreciated for their ability to help organizations gather and make sense of their data, data warehousing and BI are becoming increasingly sophisticated and powerful.

Enhanced data warehousing techniques allow companies to store greater volumes of data without compromising processing performance. High-performance parallel database technology, data access and management tools, and robust data mining software combine to provide a complete view of the enterprise.

On the BI side, new tactics for analysis help organizations refine their searches, pose more complex requests, drill down into the data for more comprehensive understanding of trends and patterns, and even extend querying and analytics beyond the analyst organization to traditional business users as well as operational and front-line users.

Together, these technologies help enterprises not only understand operational trends but also know which actions are appropriate in response to those conditions. For example, current data warehousing and BI strategies can help companies improve visibility into existing operations. While previous generations of these technologies were adept at summarizing and analyzing historical information, more powerful processing allows these advanced technologies to collect and summarize data in seconds or hours, not days or weeks. Having this information so quickly can help you clearly see activities as they occur.

These techniques also let you take the next steps: analyzing the data and taking action. By quickly highlighting trends and patterns, BI technology helps you understand what is happening operationally and why. From there, you can perform what-if analyses using a wide variety of assumptions to determine the most appropriate action.

Progressive techniques
Active enterprise intelligence, the most powerful form of data warehousing and BI, delivers near real-time views into the data with the ability to quickly take action. This level of visibility allows decision makers to respond to changing business or market conditions in minutes, with choices that make sense for the current circumstances. Such rapid response time can pave the way for optimized operations. In manufacturing, active enterprise intelligence can help avert inventory shortages and help companies achieve perfect orders. In transportation, it can allow front-line workers to minimize the impact of disrupted operations and quickly find workarounds that satisfy customers. In service industries, it can alert front-line workers to opportunities to meet customers' precise requirements.

These advanced processes involving data warehousing and BI can provide a leg up for organizations seeking to take advantage of business improvement opportunities. Well-deployed, these techniques can help you:

	Empower the organization. You can distribute BI information throughout the company, enabling all employees to make effective tactical decisions that support your strategic goals.
	Streamline operations and increase effectiveness. By better understanding operational trends, you can reduce fraud and enhance fraud detection, increase efficient use of corporate resources, accelerate operational decisions and interact more effectively with everyone in your business ecosystem.
	Get closer to customers. Gathering information in an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and providing customers with access to current data can provide them with welcome decision-making capabilities, such as improved product ordering.
	Collaborate for mutual benefit. By sharing information from your data warehouse with business partners, you can set the stage for joint, mutually beneficial decision making.

Innovation across industries
Leading companies in a variety of industries are using business improvement opportunities to fully realize their growth potential. Savvy executives from these organizations have recognized that seeking innovation—supported by the insight that data warehousing and BI provides—is the sure path to enterprise growth.

Consider the success achieved by creative companies in the following industries:

Retailers can optimize their available personnel by matching staff to customer traffic and spending patterns. By placing employees where customers are buying, the stores minimize missed sales opportunities, boost customer satisfaction and breed loyal shoppers. Retailers can also place radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in the promotional display packaging to enhance the supply chain. Companies can track the movement of products through the supply chain to ensure that items are placed on the sales floor in accordance with retailer/vendor agreements, which can result in improved trade funds support.

Travel industry companies can use active enterprise intelligence—supported by EDW technology—to accelerate operational decisions. Airlines can quickly assess changing weather conditions and determine not only how to reroute flights to minimize disruption but also how to most cost-effectively accommodate high-value passengers who have been delayed. These companies also use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to better understand customer behavior. This knowledge helps travel companies maximize loyalty and minimize customer defections.

Transportation and distribution providers can use track-and-trace capabilities to optimize transport networks, routes, capacities and costs. They are also deploying active data warehouse technology to maximize capacity utilization, improve customer service and save millions of dollars annually in asset utilization.

Postal and delivery organizations can combine track-and-trace capabilities with powerful analytics to optimize operations. By improving truck utilization, fulfillment and deliveries, one delivery enterprise dramatically increased profitability, customer satisfaction and employee retention.

Manufacturers can use data warehousing technology as the foundation for their quality information systems. By using the system for early detection and rapid identification of the causes of product quality problems—both in the factory and in the field—one manufacturer created absolute traceability through the complete product life cycle. In three years, the company improved reliability by 200%, created a 10X reduction in defective parts and reduced warranty reserves by 60%.

Insurance, healthcare and government organizations can use EDWs to fight waste, fraud and abuse of benefits programs. By centralizing claims, provider and beneficiary data in a single, integrated data repository, a federal agency has saved taxpayers millions of dollars. In addition, the organization now uses the data to better understand medical and pharmaceutical trends, improve actuarial and underwriting analysis, perform predictive analysis and improve chronic care. (For more information on the use of fraud-detection solutions, please see the article "Guarding against Medicare and Medicaid fraud.")

Financial institutions can use mandated compliance technologies to embrace true risk mitigation. These companies expand existing programs that predict loan defaults to support consumer and commercial credit risk mitigation. Additionally, CRM helps some banks provide customer-facing employees with vital decision-making information that can spotlight opportunities, enhance customer loyalty and reduce turnover.

New view of growth
Regardless of your company mission or market challenges, corporate growth is a perennial goal. Yet traditional expansion strategies are no longer enough to ensure success. For organizations in every industry, data warehousing and BI are essential for discovering and exploiting new business improvement opportunities. As you progress, you'll learn to take advantage of these technologies to maximize innovative opportunities. In doing so, you can put your enterprise on the most straight-forward path to growth. T

The next 'best thing' Many customer relationship management-type strategies are supported by business intelligence (BI). For example, one way to grow is to attract new customers from new segments of the population. Determining which segments to work with is part of the BI analytic capability. Retaining your customers and deepening their "share of wallet" with your enterprise is another way. This is supported by using BI to determine the "next best product" for an existing customer or using churn models to determine when a customer is likely to abandon your company and following up with intervention activities to save the customer. On the product side, BI is used to help companies determine where the market is going and what new products or features they should be developing to attract customers. BI can assist in spotting trends in markets (like the switch to hybrid cars or new vacation packages) before they are reported on in the news. This jump-start gives a company a chance to stay ahead of its competitors. BI can also be used to alter the course of a campaign. It can help quickly determine whether the products are moving, the most profitable customers are being reached or the proper channels are being used. Once any inadequacies are identified, the campaign can be revised to progress in a more profitable direction. —Claudia Imhoff, president, Intelligent Solutions, Inc.

Cheryl D. Krivda has written for more than 20 years about the intersection of high technology and business practices for publications and corporations around the world.

Teradata Magazine-September 2007