Data Dashboards for a Competitive Edge

When you’re in a competitive industry (and even when you’re not), accessibility of information is crucial to staying ahead of the game. It helps you identify developing market trends, find and fix issues, and use timely information to make key strategic decisions.

This is why well-designed, intuitive dashboards are so important in today’s business world. They can display countless combinations of real-time data in clear, easy-to-digest formats. So you have the information you need right at your fingertips — when you need it. Case in point: one of our recent data analytics clients whose information wasn’t working for them as it should.

The Challenge

A fuel distributor in the southeastern United States had a variety of operational and financial systems. They were struggling to get historical and real-time data, critical in making pricing decisions and monitoring performance. They were leveraging multiple Excel spreadsheets that the team struggled to keep updated and relevant.

The competitiveness of the fuel distribution industry means you need real-time information on pricing and costs. The company enlisted James Moore Data Analytics to build a better data analytics system to help them maintain and improve their competitive edge.

The Solution

Our team worked hand in hand with the company to build several dashboards to address various areas of concern. An operational dashboard helped the wholesale team see customer order histories, customer contract compliance, whether they were behind in billing and more. They could also more easily audit customer data to ensure accurate billing and see trend analysis of supplier and customer sales activity.

Dashboards were also created for each client so the company could quickly and easily gauge the performance of each site. They included a heat map geographically displaying price margin per gallon, a way to drill through to sales and purchase detail by period/customer/product, and year-over-year changes by store and by product.

The Results

The operational dashboards helped the company improve the speed of customer billing by over 40%, resulting in improved cash receipts. Previously it took weeks, months, or even years to discover issues in billing and profits. However, with the real-time data provided by the dashboards, they could find these problems as they occurred and take immediate action to address them.

Sure enough, the company quickly uncovered several gaps in their revenue cycle. Some clients were not being charged enough, while others were slipping on profitability. Now, the company can perform these analyses as frequently as every week to stop minor issues before they become much bigger concerns.

This case study illustrates that robust and intuitive dashboards help your company stay competitive. Among the benefits:

• Increased visibility into daily employee production of customer billings to help reduce overtime, improve efficiency and reduce cycle time for cash receipts
• The ability to quickly identify vendors who don’t provide source data timely (which can lead to delayed receivable collections)
• Transparency of payable balances that are in dispute for faster resolution
• Real-time identification of billing and diagnostic codes, enabling faster customer invoicing

Contact a data analytics professional for dashboards that give you a better handle on your data — and your own competitive edge.

 

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