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Next up in the SAS Applying Business Analytics Webinar Series is Forecasting 101! This Webinar is appropriate for anyone involved in the creation, review or utilization of forecasts: demand planners and forecast analysts who generate forecasts; managers in sales, marketing, finance and operations; and executives who oversee the forecasting and planning functions.

Forecasting 101 will be hosted by Mike Gilliland, SAS product marketing manager, author of The Business Forecasting Deal Blog and a new book, "The Business Forecasting Deal: Exposing Myths, Eliminating Bad Practices, Providing Practical Solutions."

In this webinar, Mike will share how Forecast Value Added (FVA) analysis is being employed at major corporations to identify and eliminate waste in the forecasting process, streamline their forecasting efforts, reduce costs and achieve the best results possible given the nature of their demand patterns. I encourage you to make time to participate & attend this Webinar to learn how to:

• Assess the “forecastability” of your demand, establish accuracy expectations and set appropriate forecasting performance goals.
• Gather the data necessary for conducting Forecast Value Added (FVA) analysis.
• Interpret FVA results and communicate results to management.
• Identify and eliminate forecasting process waste – those activities that fail to improve the forecast.

Forecasting 101 is the fourth installment in the 2010 Applying Business Analytics Webinar Series, which is designed to enable organizations to learn from the best business, product marketing and tech experts as they highlight the value of a complete business analytics framework. Join the sessions live or view sessions on demand at their leisure.

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Yesterday I participated in a Connected Planet webinar on customer data management along with Kathy Romano, Executive Director of Revenue Assurance & Billing, Mass Markets Verizon Telecom and Business and Shira Levine, Directing Analyst, Next Gen OSS and Policy, Infonetics Research. In the webinar, I recounted the takeaways from the peer-to-peer roundtable held at the CTO Telecom Summit. Shira, Kathy and I each shared some of the cultural challenges service providers face in effective customer data management, including the unwillingness to share customer data across business units and with IT – an issue technology alone could not possibly address.

I’m honing in on this challenge because it is timeless and universal. It arose at the roundtable, of course. This issue came up as a top cultural challenge in effective performance management as part of a worldwide cross-industry research project I led. In addition, several years ago, I facilitated a government roundtable where participants discussed the fear of relinquishing control of the data and analysis. So, what is preventing business managers from sharing their customer data? How can we get them to share?

Here are some best practices my colleagues shared in the webinar:
Continue reading "Didn’t we learn to share in kindergarten?"

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Here's something you don't expect to hear from a banking executive: "The best thing that happened is the financial crisis."

Of course, Tonny Rabjerg is not your standard banking executive. He's the Vice President of CRM Systems at Danske Bank. "I know the financial crisis is not good for the bank, but for me it is good, because there has never been more focus on customers than before. Typically, banks think risk and credit are more important, but without the customer, risk and credit don't matter," says Rabjerg

So, how is Rabjerg taking advantage of this new focus on the customer? He's leading a shift in his organization from customer relationship management (CRM) to personal customer management (PCM), and committing five to seven years to the project. The difference between CRM and PCM involves one-to-me marketing instead of one-to-one marketing and personal product presentations instead of campaign-based sales. "It's about matching the customer's requirements before he needs it," says Rabjert. "I want to make sure we makes it easy for him to take out a car loan before going to car dealer."

Philippe Wallez, General Manager of Marketing, is leading similar customer-centric programs at ING Belgium. His full-scale direct-marketing project, which started in 2007, has transformed the way the bank communicates with its 2.7 million customers. Projects include targeted marketing and street advertising campaigns that put the brand's orange logos and themes directly on the backs of consumers. "If we are forced to communicate online, we will be forced to simplify," says Wallez. "Even on banking social networks, customers don't talk about banking. They talking about their homes and their cars and their financial concerns."

In 2006, ING Belgium conducted one direct marketing campaign per week. Last year, the marketing team conducted at least ten campaigns per day. How did they do it? They hired business analysts, campaign analysts, marketers, digital marketers and direct mailers. They developed a new campaign process, a new data platform, brought in new tools and established new customer data ownership policies.

The bank now has a global client contact strategy, and the marketing department reports results directly to the board every week.

The benefits of ING's strategy include:

• Fully automated service.
  
• Simple sales migrate to direct channels.
  
• More time for advice and sales in branch network.
  
• Increase advice efficiency through direct marketing generated leads.

For such a wide-scale project, Wallez recommends strategy above all else. "Whatever strategy you use, you have to have a strategy. Consistently focus on strategy and free up resources," he says. "It's not easy but it's possible."

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Since deregulation, the energy and utilities industries have counted among the most complex, posing virtually insoluble problems thanks to a variety of trends and counter trends. That was the key conclusion of discussions in the Energy & Utilities insight session at The Premier Business Leadership Series, which was led by Klas Liljegren, Managing Director of Vattenfall.

From 2000 onwards these industries have had to learn new skills such as volatility and risk management. They have also had to transition from a supply-led business model to understanding how to deliver and communicate benefits to consumers, who are confronted with a mind-boggling array of choices. Here in Berlin alone, the energy consumer has 123 live offers and the only people who are certain to make money are the companies that provide advice on the best offer.

It takes ten years to build a power station, which will then have an active life of 40 years. Yet short term fluctuations in demand – such as the collapse of industrial demand following the 2008 economic crisis – can throw all the calculations into disarray. Politicians and the public set challenging and contradictory goals such as driving down both prices and emissions, which mean the energy sector often finds itself out of step with prevailing opinions and actual behaviour, which are themselves often incongruous.

These industries are therefore becoming faster and more professional in their use of analytics, new delivery channels and better communications. Ultimately however, the data is hard to digest and for the moment at any rate, the public’s judgment is based largely on perception and trust.

Truly, this is a tough nut for the business intelligence community to crack!

These are certainly times of change for the CIO, and it often takes a confident and assertive CIO to push through the kinds of changes demanded by today’s organizations.

The theme of the CIO Session at The Premier Business Leadership Series sponsored by Teradata was very much “getting more value with fewer resources.” The audience heard examples from both commercial and public sector CIOs to illustrate how to achieve the CIO’s nirvana.

In his opening remarks Allan Russell of SAS commented that over the past half dozen years business intelligence and analytics have become part of the CIO’s remit. Companies and institutions have come to realize that they need an organized central function to take care of questions such as what BI tools to standardize on, and how they should support it.

At the same time, IT departments’ resources are under pressure. For example, Frank de Saer, CIO at the Federal Public Service Economy, whose NIS function provides statistics to government, businesses and the public must reduce headcount. Only 40 percent of his budget is available for new projects but employees and users are hungrier than ever for information. He has addressed the challenge with a three-pronged strategy:

• Rationalize and standardize.
  
• Empower employees.
  
• Empower end users.

The NIS has standardized on SAS for business intelligence and this has enabled the IT function to “outsource” reporting to employees and users such as businesses and individual members of the public. This in turn has enabled the IT specialists themselves to focus more on value-added tasks.

Emad Khatib, CIO at Emcredit of Dubai has eliminated huge amounts of manual work by using SAS. Emcredit is the first credit agency in the United Arab Emirates and has official status in Dubai. Before introducing SAS, the task of integrating data from all of the UAE’s banks (which included a lot of translation from Arabic) was a massive task. Now it is undertaken in SAS and Emcredit has seen huge improvements in data quality, which has helped drive increased revenue, transforming the IT function from a cost centre to a value centre.

The session was concluded by Hermann Woestefeld, Director of Architecture Consulting, EMEA, at sponsors Teradata. Woestefeld illustrated how IT organizations can drive change through using the “fail fast” principle. For example Ebay uses five terabyte sandboxes to develop analytical applications: if they are good, they operationalize fast; if they don’t work out, there is no great loss and the analysts can move swiftly to the next project.

In his introductory address, public sector session moderator Thomas Spiller of SAS neatly summed up some of the biggest challenges faced by national governments: dealing with the current economic climate and managing a crisis of confidence within their governments. In his experience, government responses seem to fall in to three camps: slash and burn cost cutters, wait and see procrastinators and the proactive innovators. In the sessions that followed I would say that we were definitely hearing from the innovators.

The first presenter was Kees Kloet of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, talking about the way the Dutch government is using business intelligence to prevent fraud and waste and manage the difficult balancing act of preserving the environment whilst supporting the Netherlands’ highly productive agricultural sector. In Kees’ estimation, to achieve the same result without analytics, they would need to employ five times as many people. His department’s successes in using business analytics has prompted inquiries from other departments because of their ability to deliver valuable insight out of large stores of often imperfect data.

As second speaker Beate Lohmann of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Germany talked about her department’s role in promoting innovation in government – a strategy that combines reducing the cost of government whilst sustaining growth and opportunity, something that is on the minds of governments around the world. The German government is examining a range of measures that will see increased participation and autonomy at the local level. She also talked about the need for increasing cross-border integration as some of the challenges that Germany faces are also transnational.

Closing speaker Paul Vicke, President of the European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network (EHFCN) & National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance, Belgium talked about fraud, corruption and waste in the healthcare sector. (In one report, these activities account for an average of 5.59 percent of all healthcare costs). Paul describes fraud and waste as “one of the last remaining unreduced business costs." Sadly, the whole subject of fraud and corruption in the healthcare sections is still a taboo one. We still tend to see healthcare professionals as following a higher calling when the reality is that they are the same frail humans as the rest of us and therefore subject to the same temptations and failings. In investing just one medical procedure alone, more than 3 million euros were saved.

All-in-all, it was heartening to see that the Public Sector has a vibrant program of innovation – something that we don’t always associate with our traditional views of the public sector. Perhaps it’s time business took a few lessons from our civil servants.

With industry experts forecasting another tough year for retail in 2010-11, CEOs have to start thinking more about analytics. All three speakers on the retail panel today at The Premier Business Leadership Series in Berlin made strong cases for using analytics to put customers at the center of the retail business.

Jim Bacos, Director, Retail and Consumer Goods Practice of Oliver Wyman cautions that successful analytics projects are hard work that can take years to fully implement and typically require change throughout the organization. But most retailers simply must make the effort. "The old way of doing work and the old way of being successful is becoming more and more extinct."

One key to success is to start with the Board or the CEO. "You cannot start in IT or marketing," says Bacos. "It will die. For the larger analytics culture to succeed, it has to be something important to the people who make decisions, and it has to be linked to an existential problem that needs to be solved." After receiving support from the top, Bacos says the role of analytics needs to be anchored somewhere in the organization by an established group with a leader who also has access to the board and is responsible for generating insight and improving numbers.

The wrong question to ask, according to Bacos is, "What's the state of the art in retail." That's a dangerous question and a bit like asking, "what is beautiful?" We know it when we see it, but describing it is more difficult, and opinions can differ. So, instead of looking to the industry for insight, retailers really should look within and find an important problem to solve.

Bacos encouraged large retailers in particular to look beyond expansion and increasing store space and focus instead on small, incremental changes that when applied to thousands of SKUs and billions of transactions can really add up to make a difference.

Arto Nuutila, Business Intelligence Director at SOK Corporation provides an example of analytics in action within S Group, a Finnish customer-owned cooperative that provides member-only services from grocery and clothing retailers to banking and farmer's markets. The company realized through data analysis that customers would benefit from a combination shopping experience that combined eating, shopping, filling up the car and using a clean bathroom. Previously, the group offered all these separately, but putting them together found something unique that customers really enjoyed.

Giles Pavey, Head of Analysis at dunnhumby told another story of a grocer who made a risky decision to keep budget-conscious customers happy. When the executives noticed its stores were losing sales to other low-cost retailers, they launched range of 600 store-branded discount products. Initially, the move cannibalized sales and total revenue went down. But the loyalty affect over time has shown the long-term results to be positive.

This story illustrates another of Pavey's points regarding the importance of measuring results. Every decision made using analytics also needs to be analyzed and reconsidered in making future decisions. "You should measure the results of changes you do and really understand where you're doing things right," says Pavey.

There's been a lot of talk about analytics at The Premier Business Leadership Series, says Ian Forest of GE Capital Czech Republic. But analytics are not worthwhile if you don't provide the results of your analyses to decision makers in a useful format.

Avoid these four common myths about reporting, advises Forest:

• Reporting is an IT function.
  
• Users know instinctively where to get data.
  
• Reporting is a finance function.
  
• Reporting is not cool.

"We've convinced the folks that do reporting in our business that they are cool," says Forest. To be sure, the reports he showed do look cool. And managers are using the reports to make decisions about customer value creation and real-time event-driven marketing. For example, "If a customer makes a large withdrawl, we know how to react to that," he says.

Other reports include a customer yield graph that shows behavior, channel effectiveness and current customer value. The bank also uses propensity modeling to predict how much customers will be worth in the future. Other managers use migration mapping to look at transitions that take place on a product basis.

Another summary report compares customer value today to the previous year. "I see this every day," says Forest. "This is one of the basic performance tables we use to manage the business."

Most importantly, employees are motivated by the numbers in the reports. Instead of managing the business solely on a governance structure, employees are rewarded for closing the gap between what customer is worth today and what they're worth tomorrow.

"I want to know what's happening with customer that generates value," says Forest "Value explanation becomes more clear when you understand how value is constructed.

Since 2007, the number of report users has risen from 10 to 100, but, says Forest, his goal is to get 4,000 users so that the entire organized is aligned towards maximizing value.

Over the past few days we have heard a lot about the power of analytics to drive effective decisions. But we need to put analytics in context. Panelists at the Wednesday morning session, “Leading with Confidence in Times of Change” shared some interesting points on how leaders must use but not abuse analytics.

Philippe Wallez, General Manager, Marketing, ING Belgium, pointed out that you must also put trust in common sense. The financial crisis was a collective abandonment of common sense which analytics could not correct. However, “common sense is making a comeback”.

Astrid Bohé, Senior Executive, Accenture, said that analytics must be tied to key business objectives if it is to have maximum effect. She believed that for most companies that meant using analytics to understand customer experience, which is “the new marketing”.

Mikael Hagström, Executive VP, SAS Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia, illustrated his points with some experiences at SAS companies. “Analytics often gives you better alternatives” he said.

For example, the Philippines government relied on SAS to show it how to plug the gap in public finances through a state lottery.

In another recent case a European gas company finally used analytics to predict fatigue in its $10 million gas compressors – but unfortunately, only after two had already failed. “Analytics is about probabilities,” he remarked. Problems can occur when people seek 100% certainty – but in business as well as engineering there is no such thing.

A telco company in Japan has used analytics to discover key customer music interests based on online behavior, and then to apply social network analysis and determine - based on social influence - the musical tastes of the rest of the network. The project generated a 2.5 percent return and a 10 percent increase in revenue.

"When you face a big problem that seems unsolvable, ask for the alternative," said Hagström, "There's always an alternative, and analytics is a strong one."

Since business analytics is all about turning data into insight that will drive future decisions, it makes perfect sense that as editor of the SAS Business Report, I’d use this mid-year month of June to study the newsletter’s data – and make sure it continues to provide you with valuable information. I reviewed a couple of data points: subscriber demographics and most popular articles over the last five issues. Here are some conclusions.

Overall, analytics and management-related content takes the cake in terms of the highest click-through and engagement rates for this newsletter. That’s not too surprising since the majority of subscribers represent management-level titles. These articles outranked others by far.

• All About Analytics: Five Essential Papers
• Understanding Analytics
• The New World of Business Analytics
• Staffing for Intelligence
• Driven by Data: The Importance of Building a Culture of Fact-Based Decision-Making
Continue reading "And the data says? Analytics wins."