Unleashing a fire hose of announcements is the norm at vendor conferences, and Dell EMC World 2017 was no exception. This year’s announcements spanned a wide range of topics, from data center modernization to augmented and virtual reality, and from hybrid cloud to security.
However, as a woman business owner, one announcement stood out for me: Hello Alice, Dell EMC’s new data-driven platform, powered by Circular Board, which connects female entrepreneurs with mentors, resources and events that can help them start, grow and thrive.
How Alice Was Born
Women-owned businesses currently employ 7.8 million workers in the U.S. and generate $1.3 trillion in revenue overall. But only 2% of women entrepreneurs in the U.S. have reached more than $1 million in revenues. Unfortunately, many women find it difficult to access the resources they need to build and grow their businesses. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, they find that they have entered a new world with new rules—but without connections and guidance to help navigate it.
Among the top 100 venture capital firms, just 7 percent of the partners, or 54 of 755, are women.
Between 2010 and 2015, only 10 percent of venture dollars globally (from a total of $31.5 billion) funded startups that reported at least one female founder.
Only three female co-founded venture firms are in the top 100.
To turn this tide, Circular Board, the first virtual accelerator for women entrepreneurs, approached Dell in 2016 with a new idea to disrupt the startup world: What if we could build an entirely new ecosystem, designed especially for women founders? Dell, which has a long history of supporting growing businesses and women entrepreneurs, jumped on the opportunity, and Alice was born to help women entrepreneurs build more scalable and sustainable businesses.
Pivotal, Dell Technologies’ cloud native development platform company, supplies a good part of Alice’s DNA. Pivotal developed Alice in about three months. The Circular Board incorporated Pivotal’s software development methodology and cloud technology in its accelerator, endowing Alice with machine learning capabilities so she can grow and evolve with the female entrepreneurs she engages with.
How Alice Helps Female Founders
Alice helps level the playing field by helping women founders connect with the mentors and resources they need to successfully launch and scale their businesses. According to Carolyn Rodz, founder and CEO of Circular Board, “Alice instantly filters millions of resources down to the personalized, verified content that enables founders to scale to the highest heights, no matter where they are located or who they know.”
Alice uses a conversational interface to connect women entrepreneurs with the resources needed to scale based on startup stage, location, industry, revenue and individual needs. As more users engage with Alice, she gets smarter. Alice uses her intelligence to help guide women to resources, mentors and events that are aligned with their goals and financial, legal, marketing, technology and other requirements.
Alice provides each user with a personalized data and real-time modules. Users can also search, sort and filter queries by location, industry, annual revenue, employee count, years in business and content publication source.
Go Ask Alice
At the Mad Tea Party, the there was plenty of room at the table, but when Alice came, the Mad Hatter, March Hare and the Cheshire Cat cried out to Alice, “No room, room!” Likewise, there is an abundance of money, technical resources and expertise in the startup world, but women founders often find it “curiouser and curiouser” to decode and succeed in it.
But Alice is available now at www.helloalice.com. So if you are a woman founder, go ask Alice for help to navigate the startup system, and get access to the resources you need to scale your business.
“Digital transformation” is one of the top trending buzzwords in technology today. But what does digital transformation mean? In broad terms, many define it as using digital technology to enable innovation and new, often disruptive, business models. However, technology vendors put different spins on digital transformation, depending on how their solutions fit in to the puzzle.
Most small and medium business (SMB) decision-makers view technology as a key to improving business processes and outcomes (Figure 1). But at the same time,SMBs rank “figuring out which technology solutions can help my business” as one of their top three technology challenges. Although SMBs have bought into the concept of using technology to improve and transform their businesses, many struggle to when it comes to putting a strategy in place to achieve these goals.
Figure 1: SMB Technology Attitudes and Challenges
So I was interested to hear how SAP is framing the digital transformation story for its SAP Business One partners at SAP’s Business One Americas Innovation Summit in April. Although the ERP giant is best know for its large enterprise solutions, Business One, with over 50,000 customers worldwide, is SAP’s flagship business management solution for SMBs.
SAP’s 50,000 Foot View of Digital Transformation
In his opening keynote, Jonathan Becher, Chief Digital Officer at SAP, addressed the growing reality that today, companies need to disrupt or be disrupted. Unlike the industrial revolution, which allowed for a more linear approach to change, the digital era requires exponential change. Becher described digital transformation as consisting of three fundamental shifts:
New customer experiences, such as in the music industry, which has evolved from vinyl records, tapes and CDs to iTunes and then Spotify and other streaming services;
New business models, again using the example of the music industry, and its evolution from analog to digital buying and streaming;
New value creation, as in the case of Airbnb, which has used technology to create a new way for people to list, find, and rent lodging.
While human creativity provides the spark, technology is the fuel that enables businesses to change their business processes and make the vision a reality.
Figure 2: Digital Business Requires Different Processes
HANA: SAP’s Innovation Foundation for Business One
In 2014, Business One became SAP’s first business management solution for SMBs running on SAP’s HANA computing platform. Positioning Business One SQL Server edition as the past, Luis Murguia, SAP’s Senior Vice President and General Manager for Business One, positioned SAP Business One HANA as the “foundation for innovation.” With Business One HANA, SMBs can analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured information within seconds instead of days, and use predictive analytics to gain new insights into data and optimize business decision-making.
SAP has also modernized Business One with new cloud deployment services from within the SAP cloud. The cloud option is key to SAP Business One HANA growth in the Microsoft-centric SMB market, as it negates the need for the SMBs to understand deploy and manage a new database.
I asked partners at the event, including ECS, Vision 33, Boyum and AchieveIT Solutions, for their views on why customers choose Business One HANA. They noted the solution’s enterprise search capability, which allows users to quickly search for key information. Instead of stepping through tedious pull down menus to find information, such as how many units of an item are in stock, what’s sold and what’s been reordered, users can do a quick search. Another favorite is the ability to create interactive, Excel-like spreadsheets that are connected to the HANA database and refresh in seconds, enabling users to quickly slice and dice data, and make decisions based on real-time information. Partners also said customers see Business One HANA’s user-customizable dashboards and predictive analytics capabilities as top benefits.
Murguia described some real-world examples of how SMBs are using Business One HANA to transform their businesses. For instance, he discussed how a Medistance, an Omron medical equipment distributor in East Europe, changed the game against larger competitors by developing a remote managed care service. Medistance, which had been selling the devices, created a remote managed care service to monitor users’ blood pressure and glucose levels. It now gives away the devices to subscribers to its $15 per month service, which provides alarm notifications and services to evaluate risks and treatment recommendations.
SAP Business One Partners: Key to Moving from Steady to Exponential Growth
Overall, SAP has been steadily growing Business One’s footprint. Sales are up 17% year-over-year, and in 2016, Business One has been adding an average of twenty new customers a day. More important, Business One HANA revenues are also rising. According to SAP, 180 of the 1,000 new Business One customers last quarter chose HANA. However, while SAP is making good progress in wooing new Business One customers to HANA, key challenges remain when it comes to catalyzing exponential growth.
As Murguia noted, Business One partners are essential to accelerating this type of growth. But although some partners have seized on the opportunity Business One HANA provides to sell the digital transformation story, others are sticking with what they know—which is the Microsoft SQL Server version of Business One.
To persuade partners to make this transition, Murguia exhorted them realign their resources and thinking from opportunistic to having a clear vertical and geographic focus. With industry expertise, partners can provide SMBs with guidance for industry-centric innovation, using HANA, cloud, analytics, and mobility as the fuel for change. He underscored the need for partners to make this shift by noting that:
SAP introduced a new mobile app for sales professionals, which will only run on Business One HANA.
Only Business One HANA supports multi-currency.
SAP is providing incentives to sell Business One HANA.
95% of new customers use Business One with an industry add-on, and 200 top Business One ISV partners have migrated over 600 vertical apps to HANA.
Millennial decision-makers will demand the type of Internet-like experience that Business One HANA provides.
Upping Business One’s Go-To-Market Game
SAP is investing in industry-specific marketing programs for consumer packaged goods (CPG), industrial machinery and components, professional services, retail, wholesale and distribution. It is also recruiting non-traditional partners with industry expertise, and providing more support from SAP inside sales to help partners build their pipelines. In addition, SAP has extended its University Alliance program beyond four-year institutions to partner is with community colleges to use Business One HANA in the classroom to encourage more trained millenials into the partner fold.
The vendor is also doubling down on content by making it easier for partners to find and use relevant case studies and to personalize their own success stories. SAP will help partners create more mobile-friendly, bite-size content for its Business One Repository, which currently has over 2700 testimonials. SAP is also “humanizing communication” with local advertising with its “Business One around the world” theme which features local landmarks, and a push to expand social media engagement beyond current Business One customers to a broader swath of businesses in it’s targeted vertical markets.
Perspective
The digital transformation imperative is clear. Businesses can actively embrace new possibilities and set themselves apart in their markets, or ignore it and risk being stream rolled under.
SAP Business One has a good story and positive proof points in terms of helping SMBs navigate this transformation. In fact, partners told me that once they are in a deal, win rates are over fifty percent.
However, getting into consideration (outside of some European countries and Latin America, where SAP Business One is a recognized SMB brand) is still a struggle. In many geographies, SMBs often discount SAP as a big business brand that’s not for them.
Furthermore, SMBs have many choices when it comes to ERP. While SAP Business One HANA is much less complex than its large enterprise ERP solution, Business One is arguably more complex and takes longer to deploy than several other choices. Some businesses are willing to accept complexity in return for a high degree of customization capabilities, but many will balk at the upfront learning and implementation curve,
To meet its exponential growth goals, SAP needs not only to deliver on the marketing programs discussed above, but must also:
Develop more compelling “high air cover” brand awareness. SAP needs a much more compelling, omnichannel brand campaign to increase the odds that Business One gets invited to the SMB table.
Do a better job of “connecting the dots.” How exactly does SAP Business One HANA help SMBs transform and achieve success in the digital era? Why is It more effective than other solutions? SAP must paint a more detailed picture and provide more industry-specific metrics to drive the story home.
Clear up the cloud story. Business One cloud options are still difficult to sort through. My understanding is that services from the SAP cloud are available in North America, but not in other countries. Some of the European partners I spoke with have their own hosting centers, and say that because of customization requirements and data privacy laws in Europe, multi-tenant cloud isn’t a viable option. If SAP really wants to use the cloud to fuel HANA adoption, it needs to have a much more straightforward cloud story or risks having pure cloud competitors undermine it in deals where cloud is the customer’s preference.
Put the SAP SMB puzzle pieces together. SAP needs to pull together Business One, Business By Design, Concur, Ariba, SAP Anywhere and other SMB-related SAP solutions into a more holistic, understandable SMB strategy.
SAP has come a long way in transforming the Business One solution for the digital era. However, only time will tell if it can go the distance with additional steps necessary for solution transformation, partner development and marketing reinvention.
The retail sector has a well-earned reputation as one of the most challenging industries for participants to navigate successfully. Retailers – be they traditional brick and mortar companies, online sellers or, often, a combination of the two – must manage complex supplier relationships and inventories while also catering to the sometimes mercurial wants and needs of their end customers. For retailers, “supply and demand” is more than a trite catchphrase. Rather, it encapsulates an ever-shifting and intricate relationship that demands real-time data, accurate forecasting and efficient operations if the retailer is to generate profits in a business characterized by razor-thin margins.
In short, retailers truly need a 360-degree view of their business, encompassing suppliers, consumers and the many processes that connect the two. With little room for error, retailers and etailers must not only track critical operational metrics closely, they must continually strive to make their processes more efficient and effective.
Retailers sit at the nexus between wholesalers and distributors on one side, and end buyers on the other. They must deal with product availability and pricing demands from their suppliers, while keeping their store offerings competitively priced and in line with current customer demands. As friction-free online shopping options proliferate, maintaining customer loyalty as well as profitability is proving increasingly elusive. Among the operational challenges retailers face:
Retail businesses encompass supply-side and demand-side
Supplier-side Challenges:
Product availability and pricing: All but the largest of retailers are at the mercy of their suppliers, who can set prices close to retail selling prices and whose products may not always align with changing customer demands.
Incoming inventory management: Retailers need to maintain inventory levels and mixtures aligned with the current and forecasted consumer preferences, which aren’t always the same as the suppliers’ preferences and product lines.
Buyer-side Challenges:
Outgoing inventory management: Retailers must have good visibility into inventory levels and purchasing trends to ensuring that inventories are stocked to meet both current and future demands, while limiting overstocking and forced discounting.
Customer satisfaction: In addition to ensuring that they have the right product selection and price points, retailers must work to engender customer loyalty while also increasing the number and value of products each customer buys.
Commerce operations: As higher percentages of retailers enter the online selling realm, they must deal with everything from cart abandonment rates to rapid and accurate processing of orders and shipments.
In addition to the above challenges, retail and distribution business today need to think globally. Digital commerce enables them to setup web-shops and transact beyond their geographic borders and becomes players in a global economy. This is where SAP Anywhere will benefit from being part of the larger SAP company. Most global businesses need more accurate multi-currency exchanges. Does the solution calculate financials in local currencies and support local tax compliance? What languages does it support?
Having a reputable cloud provider handle these and other critical business processes – as well as providing the platform for commerce sites in some instances – frees companies from performing these tasks, which are often outside of their areas of core competency.
Target Market:
SAP Anywhere is targeted at companies with between 10 and 500 workers. Built from the ground up for the SMB market. It leverages SAP HANA to mine the data for real-time analytics and insights.
SAP Anywhere is a cloud-based solution, it will be delivered as SaaS (software as a service) by SAP in a public cloud (Amazon cloud for the US market). While it can be accessed through either mobile devices or desktops, SAP is emphasizing that it will allow SMBs to manage their business from anywhere using their mobile devices.
Perspective and Go-to-Market Channel Implications:
SMB spending on digital commerce solutions is increasing, especially for solutions that are simple and aimed at improving customer experience across mobile, social and web. This new category of front-office solution for small businesses will open new doors for SAP and will necessitate a new channel approach. In North America SAP plans to develop new channels where SAP has not gone before for SAP Anywhere and not restrict it to their existing Business One channel partners. There is also potential for affiliate partners like PayPal, eBay, Facebook, etc. Success with SAP Anywhere will also require partnerships with other type of affiliate solution providers, as part of an expanded ecosystem, that can help specialized SMBs setup sophisticated web-presence instead of the generic out-of-box experience.
Recently, I was a guest on Act Local Marketing for Small Businesswith host Kalynn Amadio. Each week, Kalynn shares information and actionable tips to help inspire and motivate small and medium businesses (SMBs) reach their business goals. On this episode, Kalynn and I discussed SMB Group’s 2014 Top Ten SMB Technology Trends and what they mean to the marketing and running of your business. The last of a four-part series, this post summarizes our discussion of “The Affordable Care Act Puts Workforce Management in the SMB Spotlight.”
Kalynn: You know, there are ten different SMB technology trends. We’re not going to have time to go through all ten things, but there is one more that I do want to talk about.
Even though we talk about small business and marketing and how to grow business on this show, I think we would be remiss if we didn’t discuss your prediction regarding the Affordable Care Actor ACA. I know it’s at the forefront of my mind, it’s in the media constantly, and it’s a real issue for people right now.
Laurie: Absolutely. Our prediction is really that the Affordable Care Act puts workforce management front and center for SMBs.
Many SMBs have already automated and integrated things like sales and marketing and customer facing kinds of solutions, because they see this as key to business growth.
But many have put workforce management solutions on the back-burner. They think of that as a cost area so they often limp along with a bunch of disconnected things and manual tracking to take care of things like payroll and time and attendance, scheduling and benefits.
Kalynn, as you said, the Affordable Care Act has made everybody kind of sit up and pay attention. We’ve gotten a little bit of a reprise because they’ve delayed the mandate for the companies with more than 50 full-time employees until next January to provide health insurance. It was supposed to kick in this January.
But, now everybody is realizing because a lot of, unfortunately, very negative publicity and all these issues that this is very complicated and it’s a situation that’s in flux.
SMBs are worried, and rightly so, about uncertainty, costs and regulatory risks. They are starting to realize that need to be able to more easily do things like calculating employee eligibility for benefits, choosing the right plans, managing compliance and keeping costs under control.
So, for purely practical reasons, SMBs that haven’t paid much attention to automating in the workforce management are going to start to do so to gear up for 2015.
Kalynn: Yes, and it could take longer than they thought the whole thing did turn out to be more complicated than we were led to believe. So, it’s probably a good idea to take this year and make sure you have in place whatever you need to have in place to make your life easier and so that you’re ready January 1st of 2015 to go live, you’ve got everything handled, you know what’s going on, and everything is taken care of from a legal stand point.
Laurie:It’s really about having the visibility into what’s going on in the workforce. Now there are a lot of cloud-based workforce management services for SMBs. With many of them, you can usually just get the modules you need. So maybe you just need payroll and time and attendance, right, but you can add other modules like benefits as you need them and they all integrate automatically.
Automating and integrating this gives you better visibility into things like hours worked, overtime, and all the things that you need to know about to make good choices, not only for ACA, but for other workforce management decisions.
Kalynn: Right, because any of those kinds of solutions you’re going to have reporting modules that will let you look at all of your data so that you can make the best choices, and so document it all.
Laurie:It’s like in your own personal life you want to kind of evaluate the risks and benefits of different healthcare options, right. Well, think of how complicated that is to do that just for your own family. It’s not easy information to sift through. Well, now think about if you have to make that choice for your workforce.
You want the ability to do what if scenario kind of thing. What if I use this plan? What will it cost? What are the downsides? What are the upsides? In some cases –not that I’m advocating this– some businesses want to know if they should be cutting down workers to part-time.
So, you want to be able to play with all that. It’s very difficult to do that if you have any more than just a handful of employees without having some kind of workforce management solution to do it with.
Kalynn: It goes back to something that you had talked about at the very beginning of the interview. If you don’t have metrics that you can run reports with then you don’t really know what the health and well-being of your business is and what decisions you should be making. That’s just the bottom line.
Laurie: Yes, and again you want to have flexibility. Think about it; right now the economy is in a lot better shape than it was a few years ago, so your decisions today might be a lot different from they would have been four years ago.
And, you know what, in a couple of years hopefully the economy will continue to improve. We may have a very tight labor market if that happens and companies may go back to providing richer benefits packages. So, it’s all about being able to adjust and adapt to kind of get ahead.
Kalynn: Right; you want to have all your options available so that you can look and scoot them around on the table and see what happens and make some good decisions.
You can listen to the complete podcast discussion here.
SMB Group is planning to launch the 2013 SMB Analytics and Big Data Study this fall. We decided to develop this survey study because even though “big data” is the latest “big thing” in the IT industry, we see a scarcity of quantitative information about where small and medium businesses (SMBs) are on the analytics and big data learning curve.
At the same time, big data and analytics vendors are making enormous investments to develop and market analytics and big data solutions for SMBs. While there’s no question that analytics and big data solutions can benefit SMBs, vendors need a sharper picture of how SMBs view, think about and consume (or not!) analytics solutions in their organizations in order to successfully reach and serve these businesses.
What We Know
We learned in our 2012 SMB Routes to Market Study that SMBs are all over the map when it comes to using analytics in their businesses. While about 41% of SMBs use analytics solutions, the kinds of solutions they use range from modules that are part of a business solution (such as CRM or ERP) to advanced analytics solutions such as SAS, IBM Cognos or Tableau. The other 59% are getting by with Excel and other homegrown analytics tools.
We also know that the cloud is on its way to becoming SMBs’ preferred deployment method for analytics and business intelligence solutions. Our survey results indicate that among SMBs that deployed analytics and BI solutions over the past two years, 31% SMBs chose to deploy a cloud-based solution. Looking ahead, 53% of SMBs planning to deploy an analytics solutions believe they will select a cloud offering.
Over the last few months, SMB Group has also been involved in different qualitative projects to understand how SMBs are using advanced analytics in their businesses. We’ve interviewed many early adopter SMBs about why they decided to step up from homegrown Excel spreadsheets to more advanced analytics solutions, and I’ve shared a their experiences in the posts noted at the end of this post.
What We Don’t Know Enough About–Yet!
The SMB Group’s 2013 SMB Analytics and Big Data Study will drill down to more comprehensively understand and gain quantitative metrics about SMB decision makers’ attitudes and practices regarding analytics and big data. It will answer questions that we have yet to see strong, quantifiable answers to, including:
SMBs’ views and understanding of big data, analytics, and related terms.
Drivers and inhibitors for analytics solutions.
Whether, how and how quickly SMBs’ are transforming their businesses for a data-driven world.
Current use of analytics for business decision-making in different departments and across the business.
Who creates and who consumes analytics?
What are they using it for and how do they consume it?
What are SMBs’ appetite, readiness and budget to adopt more advanced solutions than what they are using today?
What internal expertise do they have available to help with solution selection, implementation, integration, business process, etc.?
What do they need external resources for?
What Do You Need Answers To?
We also know that we haven’t thought of all the questions that need answers. So we’d love for you to be one of our survey sponsors, of course, and work with us one-on-one to help further define the questions and scope of this study.
Even if you’re not able to sponsor the study, we’re still very interested in finding out what questions you think we should try to answer in this study. Please take a moment and share your ideas in the comments section. Thank you!
For most of us, a trip to the zoo, museum or an aquarium is a fun and interesting way to learn about animals, history, art and other cultural experiences first hand. Behind the scenes, however, these organizations must work hard to create the engaging, interactive experiences that today’s visitors want, and successfully market that experience to the public.
This is especially true today, when these typically not-for-profit venues must compete with an expanding array of theme and amusement parks, live and digital entertainment events and sports attractions. To remain viable and vibrant, zoos and museums must continually fine-tune their vision and exhibits to grow visitor traffic and membership. They need to be creative with concessions, and optimize use of their meeting rooms and cafes.
In this post, I discuss how Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium and History Colorado Museum are using analytics and big data to better understand what visitors want and to deliver it.
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium Refreshes Visitor Engagement and Conservation Initiatives
At the 100-year old Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (PDZA) in the Pacific Northwest, Manager Donna Powell oversees all business, budget and visitor services. The 29-acre combined zoo and aquarium promotes and practices wildlife and ecosystem conservation initiatives, and attracts more than 600,000 visitors a year.
PDZA generates millions of data records daily on attendance, exhibit and event preferences and participation in conservation initiatives—but didn’t have a good way to pull information out of it. As Powell explained, “Staff generated a SQL sales report from our point-of-sale (POS) system each morning but it only gave us turnstile sales and didn’t include online and reseller sales. So staff had to pull this all together manually, which took days.”
“It also couldn’t tell us what customers do while they visit, or what they’re saying about us on social media” adds Powell. “We need to know things like, which exhibits visitors prefer, and what conservation initiatives they’re participating in, what they liked and what they didn’t like.”
Powell knew that PDZA needed to better understand visitor trends and feedback, but had concerns that an analytics solution might be too difficult and/or expensive for an 80-person organization with 2 IT staff to deploy and use. Then she attended a presentation from the Cincinnati Zoo, and learned about the analytics system that they had deployed. “They were using the same POS as we use. They introduced us to BrightStar Partners an analytics solution provider that did their implementation that really understands zoos. The light bulb went on—if they could do it, so could we.”
PDZA went live withIBM Big Data Analytics in 2012. “Everyone immediately made the connection of how they could use this to help. We can strip things out, and see how things relate. Now we can pinpoint how different weather patterns will affect attendance and exhibits, and change scheduling as required. We can also use it for marketing. For example, after analyzing sales data and open rates, we sent a promotion to members whose membership was about expire and offered them a discount if they renewed before the end of the day. We had a 6% buy in on that campaign compared to the typical mail renewal rate of 3%.”
Other benefits Powell points to include:
A 700% rise in online ticket sales over the past year, with an expectation that online sales will go up another 25% by the end of this year.
The membership team can pull the data they need in minutes instead of waiting days for IT to extract data from the POS system to create a mailing list for campaigns.
PDZA also uses social media and analytics to more effectively engage millennial visitors in its conservation initiatives.
Zoo employees now use iPads to access financial, attendance, membership and retail information so they can make decisions anywhere anytime. Looking ahead, PDZA plans to introduce a mobile ticketing solution. In the future, visitors will be able to “check in” at different areas within the zoo, providing zoo managers with more data to better understand which exhibits are most popular and how much time visitors spend at them.
History Colorado Center Resets To Attract a New Target Audience
History Colorado Center likes to think of itself as a brand new 134 year-old museum. Founded in 1879, the museum had shared the same block with Colorado’s State Justice Center for more than 40 years. “The location wasn’t ideal, and the museum wasn’t as interactive or engaging as we would have liked,” as COO Kathryn Hill explained. “Most of our visitors were senior citizens and children on obligatory school field trips.”
In 2008, History Colorado had the opportunity to build new, state-of-the art museum–and to bring Colorado’s history alive through storytelling and interpretative exhibits. According to Hill, “We wanted to understand how we could bring history alive, attract more families, and best sustain our mission over time.”
In conjunction with planning and construction of the new building, History Colorado conducted extensive audience research to test design ideas and stories. During this process, Hill “stumbled on the story of how the Cincinnati Zoo was using analytics to drill down into all aspects of visitor behavior so they could continually improve the visitor experience.”
“As a non-profit, we don’t have a lot of money for marketing, so we needed to find a strategic way to keep a close pulse on how we can best engage families. We hadn’t budgeted for analytics, but once we learned about IBM’s BIg Data Analytics, it was a no-brainer for us,” according to Hill.
In collaboration with IBM Business partner BrightStar, History Colorado deployed IBM Big Data analytics simultaneously with their new POS system. “I’m not a tech person, but I can go in and look at admissions, programs, merchandise, food, and membership data in real-time,” notes Hill. “We have a single view of the data, and can see patterns now, such as when retail sales peak and what exhibits attract the most traffic.” This helps the Center’s 125 employees fine-tune exhibit and marketing strategies.
The museum is also developing more personalized experiences for its visitors by analyzing social media commentary, and expects that this will boost engagement and repeat visits.
“We have a unique mission to help visitors understand the present in the context of the past so Coloradans are better informed in making decisions for the future,” explains Hill. “To make this happen, we need to bring people in and provide a compelling experience. Analytics helps us do this.”
Perspective
Chances are that your organization isn’t a zoo or museum. But these stories underscore the fact that big data analytics solutions are within reach for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
However, these experiences also reveal some important pointers for getting successful outcomes from an analytics investment that other SMBs should keep in mind. First and foremost, PDZA and History Colorado had clearly articulated what information they needed, and how they would use it. In addition, both organizations:
Selected a solutions designed for SMB requirements and for limited IT and budgets.
Worked with a partner that had experience in your industry, and could tailor the solution to best meet their specific needs.
Had input and guidance from organizations with similar requirements.
Whether you need to know more about visitors or customers, exhibits or products, with a clear vision, solid planning, big data analytics can provide the insights your organization needs to thrive in an increasingly complex and competitive world.
This is a fourth, additional post in the blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by IBM that examines big data and its implications for SMBs. You can find the first three posts at these links:
In the first two posts in this series, Seeing the Light: How SMBs are Using Data and Insights to Get Ahead, I shared the motivations that prompted three SMBs to replace spreadsheets and intuition with a more sophisticated, analytics-driven approach to run their businesses.
In the second, I discussed the factors that decision-makers in these three companies viewed as make or break considerations in the analytics selection process.
In this third and final post, I look at how these SMBs are putting the SAS analytics solutions that they selected to work for their businesses, and the results that they’re getting.
An Early Warning System to Prevent Issues from Becoming Problems
BGF Industries had millions of lab testing records, but lacked an effective way to extract insights from them to improve quality control. BGF wanted a system that could sort through this data, generate control charts, and proactively flag potential quality issues. The company also wanted a knowledge repository to make key findings readily available in case an issue came up again.
Working with SAS partner Lucid Analytics, BGF implemented SAS Enterprise BI for Midsize Businesses, giving BGF the “early warning system” it needs to constantly monitor production processes. “Every night this system pours through millions of lab testing records, generates control charts for each and every thing we test for, and creates a report that flags any charts where something may be out of control,” explains Bobby Hull, Corporate Quality Assurance Manager at BGF.
According to Hull,”The flexibility of the SAS solution is like Legos. You can take a little piece of this and stick it to that and get what you need.” This enabled Lucid Analytics to create a commentary field in the control charts for BGF to capture information about how to resolve quality issues. “Now we also have this guru repository so information can easily be passed on to different people,” adds Hull.
When it comes to return on investment (ROI), Hull puts it this way: “People were asking me about ROI when we started the project. I told them that I couldn’t quote them a dollar figure because how can you predict when you will avert a costly disaster? I couldn’t predict that negative, but I could tell them that the investment would pay them back because it would help us spot trends, improve quality in our products and better serve our customers–all of which it has done.” In addition, notes Hull, “It makes our auditor smile because the solution reflects our attitude toward quality and that helps enormously with ISO compliance.”
Delivering What Customers Want
Oberweis Dairy needed to better understand customer buying behavior across its three distribution channels--home delivery, ice cream and dairy stores, and distribution partners. It wanted to get its flagship home delivery service growing again, increase revenue per transaction, improve customer retention, and increase market penetration across all of its channels.
“Very complicated spreadsheets, macros and pivot tables weren’t providing the answers we needed,” according to Bruce Bedford, VP of Marketing. “Now, we understand customers’ buying behaviors like never before, and we can develop highly effective marketing campaigns across channels.”
In dairy stores, Oberweis has improved transaction-level profitability by 1.2% due to the analytical approach it can take with its menu boards. As Bedford explains, “Now we can now figure out the best configurations. What foods to put on the menu, what goes best with what. We can test ideas like, what if we feature sundaes in a waffle bowl? We can present and test different options, see what customers want. This also cuts down on the time it takes for customers to make their selections, and the time it takes for us to serve them.
In addition, customer retention for Oberweis’ home delivery service has soared by 36%–yielding over $640,000 of incremental revenue in just 6 months. “Our home delivery products are same price as in the store, but there’s a delivery fee,” Bedford notes. “We had been promoting free delivery by waiving our $2.99 weekly delivery fee for six months when customers signed up. But at the 6 month mark, we had a sharp drop in renewals. We figured it had to be tied to how we were structuring the promotion. We needed to decrease attrition, without lowering offer acceptance.”
Oberweis used SAS Business Analytics for Midsize Business to test and analyze different promotions, and learned that “when we offer new customers 99 cent delivery for one year, retention spikes up. Both promotions deliver $100 value to the customer, but the details significantly increased the retention rate, without reducing acceptance.’
The results have been so dramatic that Oberweisdocumented them in a paper that Bedford presented at the 2012 Midwest SAS User Group 2012 conference.
Improving Guest and Homeowner Experiences
Twiddy & Co. balances the need to maximize revenue for its individual homeowners with the concurrent need to provide truly exceptional vacation experiences to its guests. But, a myriad of complex spreadsheets were no longer up to the job. For instance, Twiddy needed to create daily reports quickly and provide them to staff to scan so that they could efficiently address any cleaning or safety issues prior to or immediately after guests’ arrival. The company also wanted to provide vacation homeowners with the best possible value for needed property repairs and services. In addition, Twiddy wanted to optimize property bookings and pricing based on data instead of gut instinct.
Clark Twiddy, Director of Operations, recalls that when the company started to look for a solution, “It was a black hole. We didn’t know if we would need to spend $250 or $100,000 but we knew we needed better analysis and decision support. Candidly, we wouldn’t have spent $100,000, but we had to find a way innovate and improve. Our market here in North Carolina is very competitive with 14 smart companies in the same area. We joke that complacency is a great way for us to lose market share.”
According to Twiddy, SAS Business Analytics for Midsize Business and Pinnacle, a SAS partner, helped them do just that. “It used to take 3 or 4 people hours a day to get information together into reports that became obsolete the following morning. Now we can get a report in seconds and see, for example, the median day-to-day cost for a certain type of repair, and compare costs for the 1100 different service providers we contract with–saving homeowners real money. We even have vendors asking us how they’re doing on the SAS list and where they rank, so they can improve and get more business from us.”
Twiddy estimates the solution has also cut error rates by about 20% per year. “More timely, accurate reports make it less likely that we’ll send the wrong vendor to a home, or send a vendor to the wrong home, or that we’ll flat-out miss something that needs to be fixed. Our housekeeping scores have increased, and repeat guests have gone from 47% to almost 60%,” notes Twiddy.
Twiddy has also built a dynamic pricing model that he says “is an enormous help with building credibility and delivering results to homeowners. We’ve been able to deliver better bottom line results to homeowners, better vacation experiences to guests, smarter technology to staff, and sustain a high-end brand image in the mind of our customers.”
Perspective
If you’ve read all three of the posts in this series, you know that none of these companies just waved a magic wand and magically achieved successful outcomes from their analytics investments.
But, the good news is that none of these companies needed a magician–or an IT army–to help make this happen. Instead, they got there by:
Facing the fact that their businesses would need to employ a more sophisticated approach to gather, create and use information to make the decisions in order to move ahead.
Taking enough time upfront to assess what information they needed to make better decisions, what needs to happen to make this information actionable for the people who need to use it, and how you’ll measure outcomes.
Thoroughly evaluating internal capabilities, what they would need from an analytics solution and a solution provider, and getting the information they needed to select best-fit options for their companies.
So, mere mortal SMBs–take heart–and follow the guidance of these and other SMBs that are paving the way.
This is the final post in a three-part blog series by SMB Group sponsored by SAS that examines why and how SMBs are moving from spreadsheets and intuition to a data-driven approach to grow their businesses.
To turn this tide, Circular Board, the first virtual accelerator for women entrepreneurs, approached Dell in 2016 with a new idea to disrupt the startup world: What if we could build an entirely new ecosystem, designed especially for women founders? Dell, which has a long history of supporting growing businesses and women entrepreneurs, jumped on the opportunity, and Alice was born to help women entrepreneurs build more scalable and sustainable businesses.
Alice uses a conversational interface to connect women entrepreneurs with the resources needed to scale based on startup stage, location, industry, revenue and individual needs. As more users engage with Alice, she gets smarter. Alice uses her intelligence to help guide women to resources, mentors and events that are aligned with their goals and financial, legal, marketing, technology and other requirements.
At the Mad Tea Party, the there was plenty of room at the table, but when Alice came, the Mad Hatter, March Hare and the Cheshire Cat cried out to Alice, “No room, room!” Likewise, there is an abundance of money, technical resources and expertise in the startup world, but women founders often find it “curiouser and curiouser” to decode and succeed in it.
