Held amidst the breathtaking surroundings of Coombe Abbey in the West Midlands, executives from local firms such as ByBox, DHL, Count on Us and PCMS Group gathered to debate the perception of business intelligence by SMEs, the problems they face implementing it, and how smaller companies can use it to their advantage.
David Blackburn of PCMS Group said: "For me, good business intelligence is all about helping to increase margins. In our business, we constantly mine our data so that we can better understand our business and consequently act upon it in order to further exploit revenues from our existing customer base as well as our future customer base."
Ian McGowan of Merit Outsourcing went on to say: "Business intelligence is important to us in two ways. Firstly, internally, in terms of being able to identify if we are efficient enough and secondly, externally, in terms of sales and marketing efforts. Having business intelligence enables us to get a better understanding of our customers and their behaviour. The two are quite different, but for us, interlinked."
"It's quite easy for a lot of SMEs to become managed by the business (i.e. the data) rather than the other way round," commented Scott Druck, operations director at Rowan Ltd. "Gathering data is one thing, knowing what to do with it is quite another."
Rob Edmonds, Altimus, explained: "One of the most important elements of BI is to make sure you're measuring the right data in the right way to reach specific business objectives - not just measuring data for the sake of it. Look at your KPI's (key performance indicators) and ask the right questions in the first place and everything else will follow."
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