The Issues

For modern commercial enterprises the creation and maintenance of competitive advantage relies on everyone in the organisation being in full possession of the relevant facts for the position they hold in the company.

 A well informed work force is one that is better able to take the relevant decisions necessary to keep the organisation at the forefront where its market position is concerned. Well informed employees are also happier in that they know what is happening in the organisation and can see that their decisions are important to the organisation. They are better able to plan their activities be that with respect to budget limitations, forecasting sales, analysing sales results to plan their activities or analysing performance against targets.

One of the most expensive assets a company has is data. Data also tends to be one of the most underused assets, certainly in relation to its cost of acquisition and maintenance. Data comprises facts about the organisation that are painstakingly - and usually expensively - accumulated across all departments. At best these departments often function as islands of data access to which is restricted to those within that department and is treated as secret.

 The ability to take advantage of information is also one which many companies find difficult. In expanding companies there are usually tight margins and financial pressures that mean that full time resources are directed only in certain specified directions. The provision of Information Services and Systems is not one of these. Canna Consulting Limited can help by providing an expert resource which can be applied as and when it is required. 

Data in its usual form is not much use to the average manager. Huge masses of facts are known to be intellectually indigestible. These facts need to be processed into useful, visible and accessible information before they are of use to most employees. They may need slightly different interpretation for different interest groups before they become valuable. Good information is accessible, accurate and timely. If one of these criteria is not followed the use made of it will not be of the optimum and the organisation will not benefit. Even a small benefit, say 1%, gained through use of appropriate information by the right people at the right time can be very valuable. What would a 1% increase in turnover mean to you?

Open information management should work to prevent isolated islands of data and treat most data within the organisation as valuable to all. There will, of course, be some areas that are necessarily restricted, e.g. financial data, as they are commercially sensitive. Rather in the modern manner of open government, data should be treated as open unless a good reason can be shown for it not to be so. Making company data an open resource does not mean everyone needs access to all of it but some facts may have relevance to people who at first sight may seem inappropriate, e.g. members of a management team needing to see overall profit and loss positions for all the employees in their team to be able to justify continuing with a field based representative in certain geographic or sector areas.

 Canna Consulting Limited exists to help you make the best use of this mass of data and turn it into useful, accessible, accurate and timely information. People making use of information to do their jobs better is one of the foundations of competitive advantage.

 As an example a field based representative who is, say, only given copy invoices of goods sold on his territory is, on the face of it, quite well informed. He knows what his customers are buying, what more could be of interest to him? He may be doing additional analysis on the data himself. He will be using his own ideas, almost certainly different from his colleague next door, and, depending upon his computer literacy, the method may vary from a good use of spreadsheets to the proverbial “back of an envelope”.  In addition, and probably more fundamentally, a lot of valuable customer facing time can be wasted by this ad hoc activity.

 Treating the data from those invoices as a central data resource and making it available in a set of standard reports that give a consistent viewpoint to both managers and representatives allows managers to ask the sensible questions when assessing both their own performance and appraising that of their representatives. Giving the representative better information enables him to see his territory as an entity and allows him to plan his activities and understand patterns of sales.

Example questions that may be asked:

Why is this customer underperforming in relation to this other customer?

Why is this geographical area experiencing better sales than the average for my territory/team/company?

How am I doing in relation to my colleagues?

How is my performance contributing to the overall team performance?

Am I going to make my target this month/quarter/year?

In this scenario Canna Consulting Limited can help in advising on the best way to undertake sales reporting and performance monitoring. The solutions may vary from a consultative project to help formalise the way sales management approach the problem to the instigation of a sophisticated data warehousing and reporting system.