When you come to grips with the main benefits of operational intelligence, new avenues for expansion should come into focus almost immediately.
Operational intelligence, a branch of of the broader field of analytics, focuses on the here-and- now of business. Solutions generally consist of a monitoring component that feeds key performance indicators into a dashboard that lets executives visualize business trends and patterns. The operational intelligence dashboards, in turn, facilitate the management of an enterprise’s business processes. Such dashboards provide insights that improve the organizational decision-making process. Another type of dashboard, namely an analytical dashboard, focuses on predictive analytics and emerging business opportunities. They are chiefly concerned with the future.
Operational intelligence, in contrast, is all about the present — and unlocking a business entity’s potential today. Here are three reasons understanding the essence of operational intelligence will propel your company’s growth:
1. You will gain real-time insights into operations.
Operational intelligence really proves its mettle when it comes to the dynamic nature of business. Managers need to act on situations quickly to keep the business running smoothly. Sudden spikes or declines in sales, for example, will require a fast and decisive response. A business might need to acquire additional computing capacity to accommodate increasing sales volume or devise a new sales approach in light of weak orders, for instance. In this context, operational intelligence delivers the timely performance data crucial to steering an enterprise in the right direction. Indeed, immediacy is the very core operational intelligence. Deploying such a solution will support your executive decision making at speeds that simply aren’t possible with purely ex post facto analytical systems. Faster decision making lets you take advantage of business trends, which will help you boost growth.
2. You will be able to spot inefficiencies
Any established business will accumulate its share of inefficient business processes. A process, over time, may no longer fulfill its original purpose or may become bloated as more demands are placed on it. Identifying a bad process and rooting it out, however, can be challenging. Operational intelligence, however, monitors the business and can detect anomalies and situations that point to inefficient business processes. With the identification task accomplished, an organization can fix or eliminate the process or processes in question. And once the process bottlenecks are cleared, the road to growth is opened once again. In short, operational intelligence can help you minimize inefficiencies.
3. You will improve IT infrastructure management.
Operational intelligence solutions that monitor the help desk and major IT systems can rapidly pinpoint problem areas for fast and effective resolution. Today, IT represents a key business driver. The health and well being of systems such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management are critical for company growth. The ability to zero in on issues before they escalate into downtime disasters will help keep your company’s growth on track.
Operational Insight
Overall, operational intelligence provides an organization with greater visibility over its day-to-day, and even minute-to-minute, activities. Any number of factors can hinder a business’ operations, limiting its growth potential. Sudden changes in customer demand patterns, supply chain glitches and inefficient business processes are just a few issues that can surface. Operational intelligence solutions and associated dashboards can help organizations cope with change and prosper in fast-moving, fluctuating markets.
Lithyem’s ElementOne Platform generates the metrics you need for operational intelligence and consistent improvement. ElementOne lets an organization create an operational dashboard, which provides a single pane of glass that helps you monitor your business.
What are your main operations problems? Would your business benefit from operational intelligence? Leave your comments below.
