A helpful hand – outsourcing data resource and expertise
If our data strategy series has highlighted one thing so far, it’s that having a strategy is vital to your success. It means you have goals and a plan to achieve them.
Yet, often what gets in the way of realising your strategy is not having the necessary resources or expertise in-house to put them into action. In our experience, this is for various reasons. Sometimes it’s because companies are in sectors where data hasn’t always been a driving priority. Or sometimes it’s because a company is performing so well that it doesn’t have the capacity to keep up.
Over the years, many companies have come to us for extra resources and expertise. As a trusted partner, we can bring projects to life and help deliver benefits. And the benefits are clear. Even for small, focused projects the yearly financial return can be significant.
There are many data tasks or projects that you can outsource. Projects that will ultimately help realise your data strategy.
For example, business reporting. It is important but can be slow. You’ve got to spend time collecting the data and then more time turning it into something understandable. It’s no exaggeration to say this can take weeks of work – and can be subject to a few mistakes in the process too.
Automating your reports can transform this process altogether. It saves you time and allows you to focus on other parts of your job. It also lets you be more agile, responding to changes in real-time, rather than when the slow report-building process is over.
However, automating reporting is itself a time-consuming task, which you probably can’t do if you’re spending all your time on creating the reports. change++ can share the burden and can take that process off your hands – delivering the benefits of faster and more accurate reports.
Automating reports to swiftly respond to market changes is how we helped hotel chain Travelodge. The company needed an automated reporting system that would forecast income and shortfall for the next quarter. The reports needed to be regularly updated so managers could make informed decisions on promotions and pricing. But the Revenue Management department didn’t have the expertise to build a Business Insights (BI) solution to do this.
The reporting solution we came up with collected data from Travelodge’s reservation system and past sales figures. It then performed a predictive analysis and forecast which Travelodge hotels would experience shortfalls in the future. Every morning at 9 a.m., the solution creates a new report allowing managers to respond to market conditions daily. They can choose which hotels need promotions to help fill more rooms and keep prices competitive.
By engaging change++ to support this project, Travelodge benefits from leading-edge BI, despite not having the resources or expertise in-house.
If you’re running a little low on resources, but you’ve got plenty of data, change++ can help.
