Why You Need the Best Business Intelligence Software

Why You Need the Best Business Intelligence Software

Why do you need the best business intelligence software you can get? The business environment is tough for distributors. At every turn it seems like there is another challenge to overcome whether it is persistent inflation, Supply Chain issues, global conflicts or some other crisis. So, what can you do to grow your distribution business and increase profitability? All these challenges are systemic and out of your control – right? Wrong.

There are things you can do. You can get the best business intelligence software you can, to slice and dice your ERP data to uncover real insights into your business that you may have missed. You will then be able to find opportunities to increase sales, improve processes, cut costs and improve margins. The best business intelligence software can also help you to make better and faster data-driven decisions.

What Is the Best Business Intelligence Software?

Data analytics and business intelligence tools help distributors analyze business data. However, the best business intelligence software lets users query the data to follow an unstructured train of thought and drill down to uncover previously unsuspected relationships in the data. This is extremely powerful. Accolent ERP's integration with Phocas delivers just this kind of best business intelligence software capability.

Best Business Intelligence Software Can Help Grow Sales

There are many studies that have shown that data-driven companies typically grow faster and see an increase in sales. McKinsey found that companies that analyze their customer data to find out what their customers are buying and why, far outperform their competitors on Sales, Sales Growth, Profit and ROI metrics.

The best business intelligence software can help you analyze your existing customers’ buying behavior to uncover cross-sell and up-sell opportunities you weren’t aware of. Taking advantage of these may be much easier to capitalize on than finding and winning new customers. For example, some customers may buy several products together, and the best business intelligence software gives you the tools to uncover these insights. Then you can drill down to find those customers that are buying only one or two of those products but not others. You can then research why and offer incentives on the products they aren’t buying.

Another example might be for products that are purchased together, but some have sales that are rising, and some have sales that are falling. Researching this might signal, for example, that customers are substituting one product for another. With early-warning alerts like this, you can outpace your competitors by modifying your purchases to make sure you have stock of the products being switched to and find ways to clear out the products that customers are substituting away from.

Also, the best business intelligence software can help you analyze your data to better predict trends or changes in your customers’ behavior and then to act on these insights to grow sales.

Evaluating Inventory Performance

Most distributors’ biggest investments are in their inventory. The best business intelligence software lets you analyze which products are moving and which are not. Then, comparing these to the cost of stocking the products and their margins can lead to many very powerful insights that can help you cut costs.

For example, an inexpensive product with a low margin but that moves quickly could have a higher ROI than a more expensive product with a higher margin that ties up more capital and moves slower. You might want to evaluate opportunities to cross-dock and/or drop-ship certain higher cost products.

Continually analyzing how your inventory is performing and how this changes product by product, over time can have huge cost-saving implications for your distribution business. The best business intelligence software can help you keep inventory investments at target levels with as wide a selection of goods as possible. This will also help avoid both dead stock that isn’t moving, as well as lost sales opportunities due to insufficient safety stock.

Diversifying Supply Chains

Every distributor has had to rethink how to source goods. The old model of having one or two go-to suppliers is no longer practical in many cases. Many distributors have now broadened their supplier networks to build in supplier, geographic and logistical flexibility. Also, more and more distributors are considering reducing inventory levels and ordering goods as when needed and cross-docking or drop-shipping. This can help reduce costs and protect against supply chain breakages.

However, with this comes the need to continually analyze which suppliers are performing well and worth keeping and which are not. The best business intelligence software lets you evaluate suppliers on their ability to fill purchase orders correctly, how long it takes to supply the goods, terms, price, availability of the goods, and relationships with delivery vendors. It can also help you spot early warning signs such as if an otherwise reliable supplier’s delivery times are going up or fill rate is going down. This information lets you take steps to protect your business and your customers.

Improving Processes

There is always room for process improvement particularly with warehouse operations that are typically very labor intensive. In order to be able to make good process improvements though you need to be able to assess where the process improvements can be made and how they can best be implemented. These determinations are inherently data-driven.

For example, the best business intelligence software will let you see where problems lie, so you can improve the productivity of your picking operations. You may need to make changes to your warehouse layout, or to your picking process, or to the picking patterns you are using, or it might be a factor of the pickers themselves. Analyzing the picking productivity data along a number of different dimensions can help you understand what processes are not working for you. This then lets you make changes to your business processes to reduce costs, improve productivity and will lead to higher margins.

You might also be able to benchmark particular pickers or processes that deliver better results and use these as models or examples.

Improving Decision Making

There are a huge number of ways in which the best business intelligence software can help you to make better, more-informed data-based decisions faster. Particularly in a challenging and rapidly changing environment, knowing when there are problems sooner than your competitors lets you take steps to address these and gain an advantage over your competitors.

With the best business intelligence software, you can evaluate and assess your ERP data in real-time to look at various “what-ifs.” Emphasizing data-driven decision making will also help facilitate building a solutions-focused organization. Distributors’ employees are usually closest to the problems and will typically see these first. By giving employees access to business intelligence tools, rather than just reporting problems they can find and propose solutions. This employee empowerment can have very far reaching effects and will always result in better solutions.

Summary: Why You Need the Best Business Intelligence Software?

If you want to find out more about what the best businesses intelligence software can do for you, contact us. We can show you how the integration of Accolent ERP with Phocas’ best business intelligence software can help your distribution business grow sales, cut costs and improve margins.