3 Business Intelligence Benefits of Insightful Analytics

The recent pandemic has shown us that the ability to react to changing conditions is just a starting point. Rapid forecasting and adapting your plans on the fly is a proven recipe for the agility necessary to recover quickly. You've heard a lot about business intelligence benefits, but it's no longer "nice to have" the ability to dynamically make data-driven decisions based on real-time information that is reliable. It's no longer optional in order to keep pace. We break down what the experts say you need in order to emerge stronger.

Business Intelligence Benefit #1: Track Shifts in Consumer Behavior

In a recent article, McKinsey & Co. states it was crucial to monitor and attempt to predict shifts in consumer behavior. While the economic impact was widespread, the firm reported it was most visible in the consumer goods sector. It said that companies that take "thoughtful and swift action can build the resilience needed to weather the storm."

This may sound complicated, and it is, but with the right data analytics software in place with your Acumatica ERP,, you and your teams are able to create dashboards and reports to query any period you want. With business intelligence by Phocas Software, it's easy to expand your Acumatica ERP to see insights related to Sales:

• Month to date, including seasonality influences
• Broken down by territory so you can see which are performing best
• By product class so you can see which are struggling or growing

Business Intelligence Benefit #2: See Changes in Point of Purchase

Where and how we shop after the pandemic is so different than before. In spite of curbside pickup and contactless payments, McKinsey reports that they expect to see a continued use and continued rapid growth in the e-commerce sales channels that were buoyed by shelter-in-place orders and fewer in-person shopping trips.

Would the trend towards e-commerce been good for your team to know? Would you have reacted sooner? The ability to spot trends in the data equates to the ability to act on the information. Until you know what's happening, and why it's happening, you won't know what levers to pull to correct, or avoid a bad situation. And if you're relying on Excel, these types of insights are nearly impossible to get to quickly, which drives successful companies to seek out an integrated Acumatica data analytics software like Phocas to solve this problem.

Business Intelligence Benefit #3: Stronger Data-driven Decisions from all Areas of the Business

Today, it’s more important than ever to rely on a broader base of users across your business to help make better and more informed decisions for your organization. To achieve this, it's key for every level of the business and every department to have easy access to data. With the ultimate goal of being more people with one single view of the truth making better data driven decisions.

With Phocas Software, it's easy to see it all. You can drill into data to follow a hypothesis as to a root cause, or slice and dice data to do in-depth analysis in just a few clicks. And because Phocas is combining data from your various sources, you get the ability to manipulate connected data in a way Excel never will.

If you’re like a lot of companies, you have disparate sources of data with their own areas of opportunity around profitability. In order to see actionable insights, that data from all the various sources must be aggregated and analyzed. With Acumatica data analytics software from Phocas Software, it’s easy to bring in data from all those different sources quickly and easily to see real insights.

Join data from different sources that may only have one or two elements in common. A really good example can be seen when Acumatica users have sales data history coming out of invoices as well as separate CRM activity. Phocas Software will join the two sets of data and associate it to the same customer record to give you advanced insights to grow your sales.

Phocas Software is an Acumatica-certified and customer-validated solution, and for more than 20 years, has advanced the business intelligence and data analytics capabilities of over 1,700 companies and 20,000 plus users.

If you’d like to get business-changing insights from the Acumatica data at your fingertips, contact the Acumatica experts at Phocas Software today to request your 30-minute demo.