Spreadsheets have long been the trusted tool for finance professionals to create budgets, analyse variances, and conduct scenario modeling. However, as business data continues to expand and financial challenges become more intricate, the limitations of spreadsheets can lead to hidden costs.
In this blog post, we will explore four key ways in which using spreadsheets as a business intelligence tool may be holding you back. Additionally, we will delve into how an alternative system tailored for intelligent data management and analysis can offer significant business advantages.
Enhanced Business Clarity
Having a clear overview of business operations is crucial for enabling employees to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the curve. However, relying on manual spreadsheets for business intelligence can lead to decisions being based on outdated or inconsistent data across different departments. For instance, sales and inventory management teams may be working off separate spreadsheet reports, hindering collaboration and hindering overall business visibility.
Implementing analytics solutions can offer real-time dashboards and reports that provide up-to-date and consistent information for all teams within the organisation. These interactive dashboards allow users to easily explore both summarized and detailed data with just a few clicks. By automating data capture and validation processes from various systems, the reliability of the data is significantly improved.
Having a single, reliable source of business activity can help departments like sales and inventory management streamline processes to enhance product turnover and profitability.
Maximising Data Usage
Data is a valuable asset for businesses, yet many miss out on opportunities due to limited access to the right information. Disconnected financial systems and integration hurdles can impede business operations, hindering decision-making processes. For instance, a CFO seeking end-of-year price adjustments may struggle to review sales reports compiled from data scattered across different subsidiaries.
Frequently, spreadsheets are used to amalgamate data extracts from various systems for consolidated reporting. However, this method can be cumbersome, prone to errors, and inefficient, especially when performed on a regular reporting basis. Unlike data warehouses, spreadsheets lack the capacity to handle high-volume data and execute quick queries, risking data mishandling, corruption, or exclusion of information when dealing with over one million rows.
Boosting data utilisation is essential for enhancing productivity and decision-making in businesses. Analytics solutions can facilitate seamless integration across organisational systems, ensuring automatic data refreshes on a predetermined schedule. These solutions are adept at analysing vast and intricate datasets through a traceable, shareable, and repeatable process. Furthermore, analytics governance plays a vital role in mitigating spreadsheet vulnerabilities like data entry inaccuracies, file corruption, unauthorised access, and version control issues that could potentially lead to financial or reputational harm.
Maximising Returns on Your Data
As investments in data and analytics initiatives soar, unlocking their full potential remains a significant challenge. The constraints of spreadsheets when handling analytic workloads and enabling real-time collaboration result in missed opportunities to uncover and share valuable data insights. Moreover, the talent within organisations often gets bogged down in data management tasks rather than leveraging analytics to enhance operations and elevate the customer experience.
While establishing a direct correlation between technology investments and financial growth can be complex, an alternative metric for assessing value lies in customer impact. By amalgamating data from various touchpoints dispersed across systems, a unified view of customer preferences can drive personalised recommendations and tailored experiences. Additionally, measuring business agility through real-time sales trend analysis empowers swift adjustments in response to market dynamics, such as optimising inventory and forging partnerships with new suppliers to meet emerging demands.
The key to amplifying value creation lies in deploying advanced analytics solutions that offer self-service capabilities. These tools enable frontline employees, back-office staff, and executives to seamlessly access, integrate, and analyse business data for agile decision-making. By liberating top talent from mundane manual reporting tasks, organisations can unlock the full potential of their data, fostering innovation and paving the way for groundbreaking offerings.
A Competitive Edge With AI
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance, it is increasingly embraced to tackle intricate analytical tasks more effectively than ever before.
The finance sector is leading the way in harnessing AI's capabilities, utilising it for streamlined processes like automating data collection and analysis, optimising account reconciliation, and enhancing risk management through dynamic cashflow predictions and automated recommendations for financial transactions.
Training AI models necessitates access to a wide array of intricate business data. Can traditional spreadsheets handle this task effectively? While there are add-in tools available to enhance spreadsheet capabilities, such as accessing multiple data sources akin to an ETL tool, storing and modeling data like a data warehouse, executing rapid queries like a relational database, creating interactive dashboards and charts like a business intelligence tool, and even utilising AI for predictive analytics, spreadsheets still fall short in terms of scalability, connectivity, and governance required to fully exploit AI's potential.
There’s a Better Way
A pivotal component in optimising business intelligence, a data warehouse serves as a cornerstone for effective decision-making. Acting as a centralised hub, it harmonises diverse business data, whether housed on-premises or in the cloud, accommodating varying volumes and types of information. Cloud-managed data guarantees universal accessibility, a paramount feature underscored by recent events like the pandemic.
Moreover, self-service analytics expedite the journey to insights by simplifying procedures, minimising errors, and reducing reliance on IT support. Empowering users with customisable dashboards displaying real-time metrics, alongside effortlessly generated reports, charts, and visualisations, this toolset promotes swift decision-making. Predictive analytics, too, are made more accessible, requiring minimal coding proficiency.
Combining the prowess of a data warehouse with self-service analytics unlocks a realm of possibilities, amplifying data utilisation and analytical capabilities. Together, they facilitate comprehensive data exploration, drawing from historical insights, current trends, and future projections with unparalleled clarity and foresight.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse
Businesses spanning various industries, from burgeoning startups to established enterprises, rely on NetSuite's ERP system to drive their operations. When seeking rapid and profound insights to enhance decision-making processes, they turn to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse. This cutting-edge tool is the exclusive AI-powered, preconfigured cloud data management platform and advanced analytics solution designed specifically for NetSuite clientele.
By consolidating access to business data - encompassing NetSuite transactional records, historical data, and external sources - through streamlined connectors that reduce setup costs and accelerate adoption, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse simplifies data management. Companies benefit from a unified, comprehensive view of business activities across all departments. Decision-makers, analysts, and frontline staff can swiftly extract valuable insights from their data using a range of dashboards and reports.
Moreover, the data can be further dissected through visually appealing data visualisations created with a simple drag-and-drop interface. These visualisations illuminate data patterns and trends, empowering informed decision-making processes. Leveraging predictive analytics that require minimal coding, businesses can anticipate and capitalise on changes in costs, demand, and market dynamics.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse streamlines and expedites the journey to reliable insights throughout the business. The result? Enhanced decision-making that boosts operational efficiency, fosters a deeper understanding of customer needs, and harnesses data to drive innovation and accelerate growth.
Optimising data utilisation through analytics solutions is crucial for businesses to enhance productivity, decision-making, and customer impact. By moving away from cumbersome spreadsheets and embracing advanced tools like AI and data warehouses, organisations can unlock the full potential of their data, driving innovation and growth.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse offers a comprehensive solution for businesses looking to streamline data management and gain valuable insights across all departments. To stay ahead in today's competitive landscape, it's essential to leverage the power of data analytics and make informed decisions that will propel your business forward.
