What are the Benefits of Lean Consulting?

Businesses need to embrace the benefits of lean consulting in order to turn around their performance towards increased productivity while at the same time maintaining high level of customer relations. Lean is a process that helps create value for the benefit of the end user customer and it is looped around elimination of waste and utilization of resources in an optimal manner.

The cornerstone to Lean is continuous improvement and this helps in improving people and processes so that they can achieve better results with either the same resources or even less. In essence, lean applies in virtually any process or person’s activities and therefore, has a wide application in the improvement of people and processes.

The lean process thrives in all sectors and disciplines ranging from social care to the medical and engineering fields. In people lean consulting helps in optimizing the workers talents, willpower, knowhow, efforts, time and efforts and translate them into results while adding value by minimizing wastes and improving outputs.

This process eliminates aspects, which increase unnecessary costs, wastes of space, underutilized time and knowledge as well as the non-optimized resource applications. Lean process helps leaders to have the time to be able to lead others. It embraces leading by example. It helps businesses organize their space at the workplace by eliminating the underutilized space.

Space utilization is one of the aspects, which bring a lot of expenses to businesses, which could otherwise be eliminated. For instance, the arrangement of office and production areas could help improve the time workers take to move from one location to another. It also helps streamline the workflow in these critical production areas.

In addition, the lean consulting helps develop a team of workers that fosters resilience, engagement, morale, enthusiasm, flexibility, accountability and optimal use of resources with reduced wastages. There are different types of lean consulting and these include productivity, time, production cost, inventory, floor space, quality, transportation, and human skills.

Different lean practices are carried out to address the commonly identified wastes in business processes. Overproduction is one of the processes, which can cost businesses a lot of money and the lean consultancy helps addresses aspects of overproduction in order to reduce wastes. Organization of time is also a key element of the lean process as it minimizes the time people spend waiting and staying idle.

The movement of people and materials in a plant or business premises should be re-arranged and restructured to ensure that it adds value to the product and service. The inventory control needs to be managed so that there is no excess supply of inventory in business, which could remain underutilized or unsold in the warehouses.

Peoples need to translate their efforts, knowledge, talents and time into results and therefore, they need to be transformed to use the best of their unique skills and abilities. Quality control needs to be enhanced so that there are reduced defects, which could lead to reduced value of products and services.

In essence, lean thinking, though has its origin on the automotive industry; it has successfully been transferred to virtually all disciplines and produce great improvements in elimination of various types of wastes, reduction of production time and minimization of inventory. Last but least, lean consulting also minimizes storage space and enhances efficient use of personnel resources.

What are the Top Applications of Business Intelligence (BI) Systems in SMEs

Businesses create a lot data and for them to use the data meaningfully, they need to use business intelligence applications software to analyse the raw data and translate it into a reliable information. In business processes, companies continuously create data, which may be stored in files, spreadsheets or other forms of databases. This data is a valuable tool for the company in making key decisions and improving the functional role of different departments of the business. 

What is business intelligence? 
In definition, business intelligence-BI is an umbrella term, meaning that it is a term that carries many terminologies such as data mining, data analytics, data querying and data reporting with use of business intelligence software. It is therefore a process of software applications that is used to analyze an organization’s raw data and provide meaningful information, which can be relied upon in making key business process decisions.

Small businesses are still not embracing the potentials, which are presented by business intelligence tool in their processes because they are reluctant in investing in this essential technology. These small businesses can leverage analytics capabilities and be able to transform their decision-making processes and steer their business to growth. About 40% of the mid-market businesses are interested in predictive analytics software, according to Tachaisle survey. The following are the top applications of business intelligence.

Data visualization
One of the areas of business intelligence applications is in data visualization. This is the process of presenting data in visual graphics, which makes it easier to understand and comprehend. The main goal of data visualization is to enable different people in the business to understand the textual and number information more clearly through visual presentations. Businesses can use graphics to display their sales trends in different periods. Graphical data presentations are essential in making comparisons in business performance.

In addition, data visualization should also be able to stimulate the viewers’ engagement and entice them to capture the details in whole. For instance, a drill down of the sales data entails navigating through the details such as accessing individual product sales in a particular region, and individual sales representative performance details for a particular period of time.

Reporting
Another area of BI application is in reporting. Small businesses can make use of financial reporting and forecasting software tools to understand their financial performances. Furthermore, small businesses like other entities do not operate in “vacuums” meaning that they are in a real business environment where data sharing is essential. One of the aspects in which data is required to be shared is in the field of research. Research is very important as it helps businesses know where they are now and where they are heading.

Knowledge management
BI is also used in knowledge management by business intelligence analyst. Small businesses need to participate actively in knowledge management in order to achieve their set goals. There are knowledge management software systems, which are used in learning management as well as regulatory compliance. Take for example a case where customers walk into your store and don’t buy anything. This doesn’t mean that since there are no sales and customer information that is entered into the databases, the business should not know more about the behaviour of those customers.

Businesses can use the CI systems to carry out surveys and use that data to make inferences as to why the customers are behaving in such a manner. It is also imperative to understand that not all business intelligence tools are applicable to every other small business and therefore, a thorough research and advice should be sort to establish the best viable BI for each small enterprise business entity.

Exploitation
Last but not least, business intelligence is used to measure performance. Like the large corporate, the small businesses need to know where they are today in terms of performance by comparing their previous data, current data and future expectations. This is where business intelligence systems come in handy. 

Businesses can have very huge data stored in their systems but if this data is not analyzed to produce key beneficial information, which can be used to make decisions and change business processes for the better, then it remains useless data taking up storage resources for the company. Small businesses need to realize that such data produced by business intelligence software can be used as a tool for reorganizing their business processes.

Top Benefits of Using Integrated Business Intelligence (BI) Systems

Many companies have invested in business intelligence (BI) systems but most of these are typical BI installations, which entail a mix of various customized and packaged intelligence systems with applications that access data from multiple stores. What this means is that the businesses have not consolidated their BI systems into one large system application, which handles different data inputs. For instance, an accounting system offer finance-oriented data output while marketing and sales system offers information on business marketing.

Using integrated BI systems reduces the number of employees obliged to perform business processes thus saving the businesses the cost of hiring additional workforce. In addition, the turnaround time of creating business reports is reduced significantly. Businesses need reports done in time so that decision-making processes are not stalled. The stagnation of the decision-making process negatively affects business growth and continuity.

In ensuring efficiencies in business processes, the BI tools and systems create benchmarks, which allow companies to easily identify areas of weaknesses and strengths and thus make swift actions to address any shortcomings. The process of mining data from the business data archives can help in uncovering forgotten, hidden or lost data, which can help a business avert past mistakes and learn from the past strategies. With the integrated business intelligence system, these business reports are available on-demand. This makes it easier to drill down and across the details of the report as well as sort and filter the details for easy tabulation.

Moreover, there is increased interactivity within the integrated BI systems as information is easily shared across departments. For instance, data stored in the accounting enterprise resource planning-ERP system and the customer relations management-CRM system is shared through data consolidation, which in turn produces better results in decision making.

As businesses continue to register increased data creation and storage, they are also finding it necessary to use that data in making decisions more quickly. In order to ensure that the huge data created by the systems is turned into meaningful information, integrated BI systems can be used to tabulate and manipulate the data. The unstructured best-of-the breed business intelligence tools are posing a challenge to business executives as the data they get from independent systems is not coordinated into one output platform where it can easily be tabulated.

However, by adopting a standardized BI strategy with help of business intelligence analytics, this helps in integration of the business intelligence for informed decision making. Whereas BI tools are not “decision makers” by themselves, if they are applied consistently and in well structured forms, they can evolve to be tools of enhancing decision making.

In addition, dashboard reports offer current metrics of the performance of the business showing the health and wellbeing of the company in real times. Key performance indicators-KPIs are offered in graphical formats through data visualization so that the users can easily tabulate the data reports. Whether, it is data from the accounting package, payroll systems or the CRM, all this can easily be accessed with the integrated BI systems tools.

Whereas the benefits of integrated BI systems may not be exhaustively covered, it is imperative to mention that companies have benefited from integrated and standardized BI systems because they are cost effective to implement.

In conclusion, as companies embrace business intelligence, it is important that they identify a BI partner who is able to offer integrated BI systems, which can help businesses save in their intelligence investment. Whereas it is difficult to place tangible value on the benefits of BI, businesses can capture the aspect of BI cost and returns on investments (ROI) for their BI investments. This can help in determining the cost of purchasing and applying the systems in data warehousing, information delivery, and data collection, and the associated infrastructure such as software and support resources, needless to mention the expertise required in enterprise business intelligence systems applications.