Business Intelligence
Many new clients were echoing the same message; they were embarrassed they were unable to quickly and easily report to their CPO or CMO exactly how much money they were spending with their marketing agencies.
Yes, each brand team knew their budget, and the finance organization had the rolled-up budgets, but there was no single source of truth, or centralized database, capturing agency spend and performance information at a more detailed level. This is a common challenge for large, multinational companies. Their ERP system doesn’t provide the appropriate level of agency activity to be able to perform business analytics on agency performance, production and creative spend, and project tracking so most companies rely on spreadsheets and lots of emails.
Decideware helps large advertisers not only centralize and streamline their agency data, (to create that single source of truth), we also develop custom, easy-to-understand dashboards and reports. Our business intelligence team creates data visualizations that can quickly highlight key, actionable insights. Decideware’s Business Intelligence team specializes in taking large data sets and making it easier for clients to identify trends, patterns, and outliers.
Below is a simple illustration of how data visualization helps present a clearer picture.
Count the numbers of 1’s in the original presentation vs. the 2nd presentation.
Original presentation of data:
Presentation with data visualization:
The number of 1’s is the same in both images, but when presented with data visualization, you can easily identify the 1’s, count them, and see a pattern emerge. This is the power of business intelligence.
Below are a couple of examples where clients have benefited from Decideware’s Business Intelligence expertise.
Case Study 1
Major Advertiser Uses Business Intelligence to Inform and Improve How They Manage Their Agency Management Program and Relationships
Simply automating processes and centralizing data without a solid understanding of how the foundational data structure impacts the ability to perform business analytics will result in lackluster Business Intelligence. A major US advertiser came to Decideware because of our in-depth experience and understanding of how to structure data to provide powerful and actionable Business Intelligence. A large US advertiser moved to Decideware because they were not getting the level of Business Intelligence they needed from an alternative software provider. They had all of their data captured in a database, but because it wasn’t structured appropriately, they were unable to pull meaningful and actionable analytics from the data.
The advertiser wanted analytics that would enable them to gain a better understanding of the types of deliverables they were buying, how deliverables and costs were broken down by business unit, which agencies were performing well relative to cost, and much more. Decideware worked with the client to understand the end goals as part of the software implementation due diligence—it is a fundamental and critical first step to setting up agency management software to perform powerful data analytics. With the right data structure in place the business intelligence team worked with the marketing operations and procurement teams to create data visualizations to help them understand their data in a way that enabled them to make faster, more informed decisions. Custom dashboards were created based on scope of work, performance evaluation, production, and diversity, equity & inclusion data. The result was the client was able to quickly and easily interpret the data, filter and drill down into details that helped inform business decisions.
Example of Business Intelligence:
Case Study 2
Travel Industry Client Thankful They Had Decideware When The Pandemic Hit
Expect the unexpected. Yes, companies can get by with spreadsheets and limited business intelligence, but when something unexpected happens, quick decisions are critical, and financial sustainability is at stake, having access to timely, accurate data can save an organization millions of dollars and help them utilize limited resources in an efficient way.
A client in the travel industry was hit extremely hard by the recent pandemic. They needed to act urgently to review all of their scopes of work, with every agency, to identify what work could be halted immediately and which agencies could address essential marketing needs during the pandemic. Informed with good data from Decideware, the advertiser made business critical decisions and partnered closely with their selected agencies in a transparent manner to minimize the negative impact to both themselves and their agencies.
Needing to re-arrange global spend in a hurry, and with the help of Decideware Business Intelligence the client knew within minutes the following information:
- Number and spend details of Scopes of Work in the workflow approval process, not yet approved
- Details of projects within an approved Scope of Work that had not yet started
- The financial impact of halting all work not yet started
- The financial impact of pausing projects that were already in progress
With access to good data, tough decisions were able to be made at the senior level of the organization in order to protect their brands under obvious considerable market stress. Scopes of Work were able to be updated and thanks to business intelligence, the CMO and CFO were able to see the financial impact of their decisions in a timely manner. The feedback from the client’s marketing operations team was that they didn’t know how they would have managed the process with the agencies without having the Decideware tool in place.
With access to good data, tough decisions were able to be made at the senior level of the organization in order to protect their brands under obvious considerable market stress. Scopes of Work were able to be updated and thanks to business intelligence, the CMO and CFO were able to see the financial impact of their decisions in a timely manner.
The feedback from the client’s marketing operations team was that they didn’t know how they would have managed the process with the agencies without having the Decideware tool in place.
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