Working with SMEs and Start-ups for ten years now, we realize that data in all forms – Productions, sales, customer-related, and financial are available in all companies. They may reside in multiple databases and not necessarily be integrated into the books of accounts.
What does a Business Intelligence (BI) solution do? Simple steps as follows:
- Extract information from multiple sources
- Design and publish the dashboards
The CFO Bridge Advantage –
We deliver timely, accurate, and insightful BI dashboards for business owners to see, absorb, reflect, and act.
We first understand your business. We then go through your data and systems and decide what data points to connect. We iterate on the dashboard designs, just in case needed. We fundamentally believe that, when presented with numbers and intelligent insights, business owners start thinking differently and can take the content of the dashboards to a very different level. We, too, learn.
How do we do it?
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How will the dashboards look? What business problem do we want to address with the dashboard.
We review what information is to be published and in what sequence to make sense of the data for the Company to get insights. We are business partners who also understand the technical aspect. We design the dashboard layout, decide on the contents, and address the business need.
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We sanitize the information extracted.
The data can be scattered, not in a particular format, or maybe in a shape that the solution can’t read and populate. We sanitize the data and arrange it so that the solution can parse it into a meaningful and visually readable output. Let us say a product with different variants or sizes, if captured in text format, the system won’t read it and will give no insight. But we ensure the data is cleaned and put in a form that the solution does not miss.
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We link standard set of information from multiple sources.
We understand the business as well as the technology. We link the business to the data. Data that resides in various files – for example, sale information from Amazon & Shopify are two different files that need to be mapped under a standard format of online sales whereby sales data can be processed, and Amazon / Shopify are mere channels.
- Finally, once dashboards are set, who will test the output and ensure that numbers, as reflected in the dashboards, are “correct”?
We do all of the above; with our cumulative knowledge and experience as business CFOs of large organizations and working with 350+ SMEs and Startups in the last ten years, we precisely know what needs to be done for all of the four ‘key missing elements’ outlined above.
What do we not do while implementing BI dashboards?
- We don’t ask the promoters / founders any questions on dashboard designs, etc. We engage in understanding the business nuances and how the promoter / founders view the business.
- We don’t develop excel formats for the promoters / founders to fill up.
- We don’t involve the Finance & Accounts team of the companies to test the data.
