Enterprise data visualization drives dollars across many industries.
The massive amounts of customer and transaction data generated by businesses can easily overwhelm managers attempting to comprehend exactly what the information means in relation to business value, profitability and return on investment (ROI) or cost containment. Managers need the ability to quickly detect and understand the multitude of patterns and connections showing how customers interact with products and services.
Trying to do this by analyzing spreadsheets with endless rows and columns is often beyond the capability of most people. That's what prompted Compudigm to develop seePOWER, a groundbreaking business intelligence (BI) solution that transforms massive volumes of transaction and customer data into critical, real-time visual pictures of the business. Never before has the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" ever rung more true. The visual representations of customer and transaction data generated by seePOWER help managers make smarter, faster and more profitable decisions.
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Optimize retail space allocations
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Manage network performance
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Understand treatments and diseases
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Predict credit card charge-off
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Manage floor space more profitably
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Optimize spending patterns
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The importance of data visualization to the bottom line
Data visualization takes advantage of enterprise data warehouse (EDW) technology and information-rich computer visualizations to transform data into useful, actionable insights. The technology is ideally suited for analyzing large data sets and multiple varieties of data, which are difficult to assess using traditional BI tools and techniques. Instead, seePOWER uses the power of human visual insight and the brain's ability to discern complex data relationships presented as color-contoured images and animations.
This results in decision makers rapidly obtaining a qualitative and quantitative understanding of business operations. Executives can interpret and understand data quickly so they can make decisions that impact revenue and cost while there's still time to react—not at the end of the month or the end of the quarter when it's too late.
Turning customer activity data into analytical tools
By creating visualizations of the data, seePOWER gives businesses the ability to understand how customers react to various business activities such as marketing campaigns, customer loyalty programs, floor-plan changes, loss-leader specials, and sales promotions and supply chain/demand chain changes. seePOWER enables the analysis of business activity in the form of still pictures or animations for any period of time: by the minute, hour, day, month or year. This gives businesses the flexibility to analyze marketing and sales programs according to their natural lifecycle. For example, shifting the sales staff around to different departments might take months to properly evaluate using traditional BI tools while, with seePOWER, the results can be seen in minutes and hours. Assessing the impact of a loss-leader product on the sales of other products might be analyzed in the same way.
Driving dollars across multiple industries
seePOWER provides critical insights for any industry that works with large volumes of data. In particular, Compudigm has deployed solutions that cater to these sectors:
Retail – Data visualization helps retail companies strategically see an entire year of marketing activity and analyze every program week by week. Management can determine the impact each program had on the up-sell and cross-sell of other products in the market basket by analyzing the products purchased within customer groups or by individual customers.
Traditional BI tools enable retailers to understand between 10 and 100 points of data at a time, while seePOWER delivers enterprise data visualization that lets retail managers understand 1,000 to 10,000 points at a time. With seePOWER, these retail managers can understand what goes on in a store day by day, hour by hour or even minute by minute. This type of analysis is particularly helpful for managing events such as Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) when an extraordinary amount of consumer activity occurs across a compressed amount of time. Getting inventory levels right is critical. Comprehending the relationship between items on special and other items purchased hour by hour leads to an understanding of which specials successfully drove overall sales.
For customer segmentation and loyalty programs, data visualization helps retailers analyze groups of customers to identify where they spend time within a store so they can position products the customers want to buy in store locations where the customers are most likely to travel. With Compudigm seePOWER, you can actually determine how to guide your customers to the products you want them to see and determine where to place your best sales reps. Enterprise data visualization allows you to see the impact of product placement on customer activity, movement and interaction within the store.
The value seePOWER delivers to retailers can be astronomical. For one nationwide retailer, seePOWER helped them identify and reduce out-of-stock occurrences by 10%. This represented a $25 million savings.
Utilities – Utility companies face significant challenges to improve their historically low return on assets while maintaining pre-agreed service level agreements (SLAs). Deregulation and privatization of utilities that were previously government-owned in some countries have also complicated the picture. seePOWER maximizes savings while improving reliability, safety and customer satisfaction to make utilities as effective as they are efficient. seePOWER enables critical real-time decisions on energy usage, service reliability, supply and demand balancing and customer service.
One wholesale electricity distributor faces a challenge of regulatory violations if they do not dispatch accurate and timely pricing information for demand. If the company violates this regulation, it is fined by the government. In only the first month of use, seePOWER helped the utility identify four potential incidents that saved the company more than $60,000 in fines.
The level of network visibility that data visualization provides also means that the utility company runs more efficiently than ever before while exceeding SLAs. Prior to seePOWER, delays in analyzing both network demand and the dispatch of accurate wholesale prices left the company exposed to significant risk because of errors and delays. This exposure to network and market visibility risk has since been reduced from as many as 48 hours to only five minutes with seePOWER.
Healthcare – The benefits of data visualization to the healthcare industry go far beyond dollars. Because data visualization allows doctors to discover relationships between patient care and patient outcomes, data visualization improves the quality of patient care and can even save lives. Today, major healthcare institutions accumulate historical records on hundreds of thousands of patient cases in all areas of medicine. It is literally impossible to assess the impact of treatments across multiple variables by using traditional database programs and BI tools.
Using seePOWER, these healthcare institutions can analyze this massive amount of data for all the treatments, all the patient variables and all the diagnoses, and then turn the results into comprehendible pictures. This allows doctors to understand more deeply the relationship between diseases, treatments and success ratios. They can see relationships otherwise impossible to see—within a much shorter timeframe.
Financial services – For a typical credit card company, an average of 7% of its customers default and fail to pay their credit card bills. With enterprise data visualization, it becomes much easier for card issuers to identify these default risks in advance so they can reduce the number of cards issued to high-risk customer groups. It also helps identify current customers who demonstrate signs of becoming default risks. By identifying these groups of customers, credit card companies can ensure they do not send them incentives in order to minimize their use of the card. Reducing the 7% default rate by even 1% has a tremendous impact.
Gaming – Enterprise data visualization provides gaming companies with immediate information on how each slot or table game performs as well as the activities of individual customers or groups of customers. Instead of spending hours compiling notes and analyzing spreadsheets, the information is available in real time and daily feeds. This allows casino managers to make adjustments quickly to positively impact the bottom line. In addition to gaming analysis, seePOWER lets gaming enterprises analyze player information to see which customers have been the most profitable; group-junket analysis to see which group plans are lucrative; and coupons analysis to evaluate whether the casino is sending coupons to the players who bring in the most revenue. seePOWER also helps casinos assess all of their key performance indicators (KPIs) with the ability to focus on the top KPIs that drive business operations.
Entertainment/sports event management – Entertainment and sports companies face a unique challenge when it comes to understanding customer relationships. Sporting event and music concert managers need to understand the patterns of anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 customers as they interact multiple times with food, beverage and souvenir concessions. Given that these customer interactions usually occur over a two- to six-hour timeframe, it takes a data visualization solution like seePOWER to comprehend their tendencies.
By understanding how customers move throughout a venue and what types of items they purchase, venue managers can adjust the location of specific seating areas, concession stands and customer service staff to improve the ambiance and ensure maximum purchasing opportunities. They can also assess how customer behavior changes at the same venue but with different events, such as a sporting event, a rock concert or the circus. Each event brings a different customer demographic to the venue, and each event will exhibit a different set of customer patterns.
Generating bottom-line value from enterprise visualization for your company – As this article has demonstrated, data visualization offers an evolutionary approach to existing capabilities by boosting analytical bandwidth to deal with increasing volumes of customer, product and service data. Because of the power of enterprise data visualization, you can quickly understand how customers interact with your products, your services and your physical locations. Data visualization also allows you to understand your customer relationships at levels you simply can't achieve with numbers, tables and graphs. Armed with this amount of information, you can literally transform your business management process from product-centric to customer-centric.
Compudigm seePOWER has established itself as the premier enterprise data visualization solution through several key attributes:
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Proven – currently used daily by large enterprises in multiple industries |
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Enterprise-ready – secure, robust, scalable and easily deployed |
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Intuitive to use – users can quickly identify opportunities |
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Optimized for Teradata – does not disrupt other data warehouse processes and can fully leverage detailed data when required |
To find out how seePOWER can help your company, call 877-846-3212 or visit www.compudigm.com. T
� Teradata Magazine-September 2006
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