Data Dashboards for a Competitive Edge
Want to stay ahead of the competition?
When you’re in a competitive industry (and even when you’re not), accessibility of information is crucial to staying ahead of the game. It helps you identify developing market trends, find and fix issues, and use timely information to make key strategic decisions.
This is why well-designed, intuitive dashboards are so important in today’s business world. They can display countless combinations of real-time data in clear, easy-to-digest formats. So you have the information you need right at your fingertips — when you need it. Case in point: one of our recent data analytics clients whose information wasn’t working for them as it should.
Challenge
A fuel distributor in the southeastern United States had a variety of operational and financial systems. They were struggling to get historical and real-time data, critical in making pricing decisions and monitoring performance. They were leveraging multiple Excel spreadsheets that the team struggled to keep updated and relevant.
The competitiveness of the fuel distribution industry means you need real-time information on pricing and costs. The company enlisted James Moore Data Analytics to build a better data analytics system to help them maintain and improve their competitive edge.
Solutions
Our team worked hand in hand with the company to build several dashboards to address various areas of concern. An operational dashboard helped the wholesale team see customer order histories, customer contract compliance, whether they were behind in billing and more. They could also more easily audit customer data to ensure accurate billing and see trend analysis of supplier and customer sales activity.
Dashboards were also created for each client so the company could quickly and easily gauge the performance of each site. They included a heat map geographically displaying price margin per gallon, a way to drill through to sales and purchase detail by period/customer/product, and year-over-year changes by store and by product.
Results
The operational dashboards helped the company improve the speed of customer billing by over 40%, resulting in improved cash receipts. Previously it took weeks, months, or even years to discover issues in billing and profits. However, with the real-time data provided by the dashboards, they could find these problems as they occurred and take immediate action to address them.
Sure enough, the company quickly uncovered several gaps in their revenue cycle. Some clients were not being charged enough, while others were slipping on profitability. Now, the company can perform these analyses as frequently as every week to stop minor issues before they become much bigger concerns.
This case study illustrates that robust and intuitive dashboards help your company stay competitive. Among the benefits:
- Increased visibility into daily employee production of customer billings to help reduce overtime, improve efficiency and reduce cycle time for cash receipts
- The ability to quickly identify vendors who don’t provide source data timely (which can lead to delayed receivable collections)
- Transparency of payable balances that are in dispute for faster resolution
- Real-time identification of billing and diagnostic codes, enabling faster customer invoicing
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Marie Monet, CPA, CITP, CGMA
President, Data Analytics
Marie helps our clients leverage their data in a way that allows them to generate meaningful insights and strategies to strengthen and maintain the health of their business. She has nearly 20 years of experience in accounting, data analytics and related areas of work.
Marie is highly recognized by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. In addition to holding the AICPA’s Certified Information Technology Professional (CITP) certification, she is a member of the CITP Credential Committee that develops, promotes and maintains the CITP credentialing process. She was also recognized by the AICPA’s Standing Ovation program in 2016 for her contributions to the areas of information management and technology assurance.
Before coming to James Moore, Marie spent over a decade working for large organizations and consulting firms that have a deep breadth of technical expertise and resources at their fingertips. She leverages the expertise gleaned from this work to give our clients a unique competitive edge in the market. Outside of work, Marie is an active volunteer and mentor with SCORE Volusia and sits on the Disruptive Leadership Board of Stetson University.
