PPB August 2018

FEATURE | Data Analytics A famous department store pioneer named JohnWanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Wanamaker died in 1922. Howmany of us are vexed by similar issues now 100 years later? Instead of advertising, maybe your challenge is figuring out why a product line is declining when the same items did so well last year; why a previously hot account has suddenly turned cold or howmuch money you’re losing in production due to inefficiencies, waste or mistakes. For most of my career, I’ve worked as a turnaround CEO—a hired gun with a mandate to resuscitate underperforming businesses. To be successful in turnarounds, you have to be able to look deeply into every area of a business to determine whether to keep it, jettison it, reorganize it or nurture it. On paper, this is a straightforward process. In practice, it is more difficult. A key problem is getting access to relevant data to be able to evaluate performance. While most businesses have computer systems to process orders and manage accounting functions, getting access to the data has historically been limited to canned reports or the painful process of getting a programmer to create custom reports. But even with custom reports, you still can’t evaluate different scenarios without somehow getting that data into a spreadsheet. Faced with this dilemma 10 years ago, I found a gem of a solution in what was then a nascent area of computing called BI, short for business intelligence systems. Think of BI as a key that can unlock insights contained in the terabytes of data stored across a company’s various computer systems—insights that can help you perform better, grow faster and generate more profits. BI enables you to organize, probe and visualize your data with speed and simplicity. The insights it enables are “lightbulb moments”— those flashes when you gain a clear understanding of what is affecting your company’s growth and profitability. The first time you see your data come alive in a BI system is truly an “aha” experience. What Exactly Is A Business Intelligence System? Research giant Gartner defines BI as an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure, tools and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance. In 2017, Gartner pegged BI spending worldwide at $18.3 billion. This introductory article will focus on commonly available BI tools you can use right out of the box and give you an overview of how they work and what you can do with them. The market leaders are Power BI by Microsoft and Tableau by Tableau Software. Each of these programs has the ability to connect to a variety of databases, including data in spreadsheets. In addition to their extensive analytic capabilities, both are considered data visualization programs for their ability to display data in a stunning array of intuitive and interactive graphics— dashboards, graphs, charts and visuals of all types. Tableau was used for the following examples, but the concepts apply to all BI programs. How Does A BI Program Work? Similar to Excel, BI programs allow you to create multiple worksheets in a workbook, but instead of importing or manually entering data into spreadsheet cells, BI programs require you to “connect” to a data source such as your company’s computer system, a spreadsheet, your call center or even your website. When you connect to data, the BI program classifies each field in your data as either a dimension or a measure. Measures are numeric fields on which Dashboard images provided by the Tableau Sample Database - SuperStore 54 | AUGUST 2018 |