As the world is faced with uncertainty, it is important for companies to make sound strategic decisions.  Companies need a consistent and comprehensive vision into their business more than ever, especially as remote working is prevalent today.

Accurate, Complete and Consistent Data

In these unprecedented times, it is more important than ever that the data available to the decision-makers is accurate and consistent.  The quality of the data is often the difference between success and failure.

The first step to providing a vision into the business is to ensure the data is clean.

Here are some tips to ensure data integrity and cleanliness:

• Start with your people. Ensure that management and all employees understand the importance of clean data. Emphasize accuracy when training employees to set up new products or complete a sale.
• Dedicate resources to maintaining data integrity. Use technology to ensure that records are complete (don’t allow blanks) and consistent (use drop-down menus and required formatting).
• Create processes which support data integrity.
• Make sure data is timely. It needs to be updated and current, so decision-makers can make the most effective and informed decisions.

Bringing the Data Together

Often a company’s data is housed in multiple systems and it is challenging to bring all the data together.  Again, disparate systems can cause a company’s data to be inconsistent and dirty.  One decision-maker may pull the data one way, while another employee pulls the data another way.  This can cause the data to be incomplete, duplicated, or in differing formats.  By pulling the data together in one system, like a database with built-in reporting, decision-makers can rest assured that the data they are using is consistent.

Gaining a Vision

Once the data is clean and consistent, it needs to be presented in a way that allows users to gain insights into their business.

Here are some examples of tools that companies can use to gain vision:

• Reports that are pulled from a complete and up-to-date database and presented in a way that is meaningful and consistent each time the report is produced.
• Data visualization dashboards that enable viewers to gain quick insights into their business through graphs and charts:

• A Sales Analysis and Forecasting system that brings together all the vital data points necessary to make product assortment and purchasing decisions into a system that is efficient and comprehensive. This automates the data-gathering process that many companies use when forecasting with spreadsheets, also making the process less prone to errors.

Gaining Confidence in Uncertain Times

Taking steps now to clean up the parts of the business that have been neglected can put your business in a better position once the uncertainties of today have passed.  By organizing and cleaning your data, companies can set themselves up to emerge even stronger and ready to fulfill pent-up demand.

For more information about gaining a better vision into your data, contact the industry professionals at SAFIO Solutions.  We’d be happy to answer your questions about clean data and ways to glean valuable insights from it!