Business Challenge

You need easy access to a performance report of your sales force across regions and territories. Wanting more than a canned sales report listing a single indicator to let you know if the sales representatives are hitting their targets, you look for deeper insight into your data. Often, the reports you utilize use a single thread or dimension. You may be using a spreadsheet pivot table that allows you to select different dimensions, one at a time – using only the data stored within your system.

The problem with this approach is that you cannot readily visualize or easily connect the disparate data points that make up the overall picture of your team’s performance over time.

What if you had access to third-party market data, weather data, or crop data to add to your reports? What would help you more effectively drive the execution of your sales strategy?

Lifescale Analytics Approach

Lifescale Analytics addresses this issue with an iterative and business-focused approach. What we deliver is usually more exploratory in nature – meaning you can discover new data points and data relationships to better understand your business. LSA staff will work with you to delve deeper into your data to find the connections that reveal the answers to your business needs; for example, enabling you to explore and learn what is really happening in your territory or region.

This particular use case will assume that an appropriate analytic data source exists (e.g., data mart, data warehouse, etc.). If such data sources do not exist, we will work with you to create them. First, LSA staff will work with you to gain a clear understanding of your business issue or need. We will then create a prototype solution for you to view.

Typically, a prototype can be delivered within a week and serves as the starting point for discussion within your business. Following an iterative approach, the outputs of each review session are incorporated into the working prototype, the outputs feeding into each new version of the solution. Many times, the data shown during these sessions will reveal new insights and new solutions, enabling the business to adjust their focus at speed.

The number of iterations depends on many factors: data quality and completeness, availability of key business resources for review sessions and rigorous testing, and how comfortable the business is with analytics.

Benefit to the Business

Every company storing data can benefit from this type of cost-benefit analysis. As new devices add large amounts of data, it is imperative to add an intelligent and flexible data retention strategy.

Prioritizing the analysis of data usage and data retention will enable companies to maximize value while minimizing investment. This type of modeling can be performed on all domains of data for a company, while ensuring that data remains safe and in compliance with all requisite regulations and requirements.

Leveraging the return-on-investment (ROI) provides a means to better evaluate and address current and future data storage requirements.