The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

By John Schweitzer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, SAP Analytics

In my last post, I explained SAP’s “Decision Revolution” – fostering a culture of analytics to help our customers make better, more informed decisions. We addressed three critical aspects of decision making: inform, align, and adapt. Today, I’d like to focus on what it means to be informed within an organization.

What do we mean when we say “informed”? The true value of analytics lies in giving as many people as possible insight into what’s happening with their role, their department, their market, their customers, their products, and their company.

• Do you have a clear picture of what’s going on in your organization, at every level?
• How are your revenues, performance, productivity, and customer satisfaction trending?
• What about your employees – do they have a good sense of what’s happening and why?
• How do their actions influence others or impact critical results?

Remember that an employee’s level of knowledge is indicative of his or her ability to make good decisions. That’s why it’s imperative to break down the information boundaries that separate lines of business, departments, and regions – wherever the barriers lie in your organization.

Making Analytics Pervasive in Your Organization

Being more informed includes making analytic capabilities more pervasive across the organization. How can we ensure our employees have the real-time information and intelligent insights into the business that they need? We can do three things:

• Make analytics available to more people. If you want a pervasive culture, all employees must buy into the company vision and mission. If you want analytics to support decisions across your organization, you need to put analytic tools in the hands of as many employees as possible.
  
  

  Watch how Molson Coors Brewing uses analytic solutions from SAP to provide its employees with key information to enable rapid decision making at every level of the organization.

• Make analytics mobile. It’s great if employees have powerful analytic tools in the office – but what if they’re traveling to a meeting or conference? Our mobile analytics give employees access to their company’s real-time data when and where they need it.
  
  

  See how Cisco leverages SAP solutions for analytics to provide real-time business insights to a mobile workforce to help them make better decisions.

• Make complex analytics easier to use. Sophisticated and powerful predictive analytics was once the domain of business analysts. Those pedigreed MBAs were the only ones who could build the complex models required – which made them de facto gatekeepers of the data. Today, technology lets us put these powerful models into more hands, supporting better decisions across the organization. The true beauty of data is how it can help you understand the past and predict what may happen in the future.
  
  

  Watch how predictive analytics can empower your employees to gain deeper insight into your business.

What can your organization do now to remove the barriers and make valuable insights available to all?