People do the daily drudgery of entering and moving data in and out of ERP, CRM, SCM, e-mail and other applications – updating opportunities, responding to quotes, expediting orders. Or, they spend hours collecting, cleaning and organizing data from these applications into Excel spreadsheets to produce aggregate, historical reports that tell you what happened last month or last week. Not the best use of their time and abilities. Not the best use of the data.
We want to make that better. We believe that you already have data that can tell you what is going to happen in the future. We believe that we can get this more effectively to your people. So they can spend their valuable time making useful and timely decisions that shape the future of the business. And unlock tremendous strategic and financial value.

I take CRM data, which has multiple accounts for the same customer, manually add in D&B data, then look at each account to see if it is a good target; don’t know when they bought last because that is another system with another customer identifier – we miss lots of opportunities. If we could do this better and faster, we could grow revenues and market share.

I spend 50% of my time researching prospects, from data we have in SalesForce and websites. I spend another 20% updating SaleForce after my meetings. SalesForce is more work than value. And with travel, my face time with prospects may be 10%. Shouldn’t it be 90%? I miss a lot of good opportunities.

Takes 4 databases to get an understanding of the customer, each with its own nomenclature. Then, we have to see if we have the supply. Usually, the hit rate is 20%. Then we have to source the remaining and price it. And we do the same thing again for the next quote even if we have all the data. Lots of wasted time and effort. And we have no idea how much margin we are making.

If you can get data faster and respond faster – Amazon has spoiled us – customers want to track product delivery from the start of the build to when it reaches their dock door – but now we send them repromise notices the day before the delivery. Why? Because 80% of our information resides outside our SAP system.

We have the data today that could tell us a shipment will be late in the future, but we don’t, I should say can’t, use it and end up expediting it after get notified that it is late.

It sounds good, but we are really looking at what we can deliver this month. I don’t think that is what S&OP is supposed to do.

Our telematics systems send back utilization data, there is both a sales and supply chain opportunity there if we could only analyze it as it streams in.

Do I want to know how the business is tracking to our AOP? Every day? Of course I do! Just visibility to what is working, what is not, would be a great start. But, we can only do monthly reviews of what happened last month because we can’t get to the data quickly and easily. I am running the business using a rearview mirror and hoping that all my competitors are doing the same.