Well, it’s late on a Friday afternoon again, and I have just finished yet another call about using information in the ERP system to leverage business growth. ERP systems are great at standard reports and providing day to day, bread and butter reporting. However, when it comes to analysing issues and trying to direct the business, some of the more complex questions cannot be easily answered. Questions like:
‘How do we get a list of customers that have dropped their spend by 5%?’
‘I need to know about potential new customers from our CRM system by analysing the opportunities and communications’
‘I have an industry list of potential customers. How can I see which of those are likely customers, that we don’t already deal with?’
The best way to answer ALL of these questions is through effective use of Business Intelligence tools such as Qlik Sense. In many of these cases simple sales data already in the system can be used to get the desired results. All of our Qlik customers have as a minimum sales data in their Qlik apps, including customer records. So, getting things like customer spends by month or year is very straightforward. It is then a simple matter of creating a table which measures the revenue difference from a previous period and adding a total for the columns. Then put it in order of the total change and voilà! – you now have a list of customers in order of biggest drop in spending.
Of course, I can never help myself, so I select the top few customers with reduced spending and then change the dimension to product categories to see if the spending drop is related to different kinds of products. Then you can quickly add a few other metrics (salesperson, branch, etc.) for more information about why the customer’s spend has reduced and who is the staff member responsible for this customer.
The question I really like is the one about industry businesses. This is a perfect case for Qlik Sense. With the latest tools to add new data to an application, you can simply load that new list, tie it to your existing customers by business name, address, etc., and then look for all the shiny new customers that you don’t work with! Filtering by location, size, industry sub-category, etc., quickly creates a nice list for your sales staff to salivate over.
One neat trick you can easily do with Qlik Sense is to throw those potential customers into a pin map showing their locations. Then using the ‘lasso’, select a region and you can generate nice territory lists for the salespeople.
The important lesson is that you need to remember that your ERP system is there to record and manage the day to day business information. If you want to grow your business you must use the power of BI tools to analyse this information and see the bigger picture.
Shane Michelon
Talk to us today on 1300 583 097 about how Endeavour can help you to identify your business opportunities with Qlik BI.
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