There is More to Reporting Than Just Sales

If you read my last blog about being the data hero, you'll know how easy it can be to become the company hero.

Like in the movies, a hero’s work is never done - there is always someone out there that needs help. Now that you have helped the sales team by giving them access to all that locked up sales data, people have noticed. As you walk down the hall, you get that nod from your work mates because everyone is getting a bigger bonus because of you.

But how do you get more nods in the hall? It brings us to the return of the Hero. Just like part two of any movie, people have high hopes but many walk out of the movie disappointed if it wasn’t as good as the first one. But every now and then you walk out thinking 'OMG that was fantastic'.

So how do we do that in our distribution business that we have just put Phocas into? Well so far we have helped the sales team make more money, but what about saving the company money? Could we use our BI tool to not just look for lost sales opportunities but maybe look for what we are buying to stock our warehouses and what we are holding in there currently?

Better yet lets give this data to everyone that needs it. Think about it, what if we could tell the rep in the field what stock is on hand of the product that his customer is asking him about. Or what if we give the purchase manager access to what’s selling, what’s on hand currently and what’s on its way in? All of a sudden you have helped the sales team get more out of the customer base and the purchasing team are aware of what’s selling and what’s not. In addition, the warehouse manager will know what coming in and what’s going out.

And the best part is we don’t need to buy another tool to do this. We already have everything we need to build out the databases do achieve this. We can even build out some dashboards that visualize all this data in one dashboard so everyone can see all this new data with the existing sales data.

So now you are the hero to the Purchase team and the warehouse guys, more people giving those much-enjoyed nods in the hallway.

Do you have any questions about becoming the data hero in your business? Ask us on Twitter @Phocas_Software or contact us here.