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Its a well accepted fact that spreadsheet is a tool which analysts, business executives and the rest of the crowd swear by. But did you ever realize that the data that’s in there is being manually fed.Here many things can go wrong 1) wrong data 2) uncensored data (no access control) 3) stale data 4) data of convenience!Strategist, specially at the top would be taking decisions based on information from spreadsheets which can either be or all of the above mentioned points.One may argue that their data is correct and up-to-date but in reality information gets biased as it travels up the hierarchy. And here we have key people in an organization taking important decisions based on them.Operational BI on the other could provide a framework which will directly feed data into the system from various sources and be able to present information which is unbiased and would not only help take better decisions but take informed decisions in near real time.I believe that Business Intelligence is critical in the decision making process but without a proper data  source mechanism in place it could lead to results best avoided.

Email Entry BI of convenience, Operational BI, spreadsheet, spreadsheet and bi, Spreadsheet BI

There has been a lot noise around traditional BI being a failed promise. In fact, Market Dynamics, a UK-based research organization, published a report on how Fortune 500 companies are losing millions of dollars in lost opportunities.Can it truly be attributed to traditional BI alone? Well, to answer that question one needs to comprehend the context in which BI is implemented.Traditionally, IS reports have been used by management executives to formulate strategies for their organization at a global level. Say, for instance, a pharmaceutical company would be more interested in identifying patterns to better understanding the usage of a particular drug for a region or occurrences of particular diseases in a geographic location.These, as you may well understand, are data which have been accumulated over a period of time, at times ranging in years. On the contrary, a downstream manufacturing company would benefit more from tracking whether their shipments are being delivered on time as that affects their business directly.As you can see, that the former approach falls more in the traditional BI category where the top brass would use the data to start an R&D initiative for a new drug or come up with a strategy to position a different drug for a particular market. The key thing to note is that to take such a decision you would require data with a wider time window, possibly a few months/years of data.In the latter scenario, the time window to respond to anomalies is extremely short and it directly impacts operations within as well as outside the organization to make decisions very quickly. As an example, a semiconductor company could be providing low budget components to mobile manufacturers. In today’s uncertain times, most of the manufacturers keep a very low inventory and are dependent on the downstream suppliers to deliver components in a timely manner as their assembly line is completely dependent on it.As you may be aware that a delay in shipment can trigger a flurry of activities affecting the line of business executives directly dealing with the customer, the finance department as a delay in shipment could affect the payment position, the planning department would need to rework on the next schedule and above all the customer would have to be informed about the delay so that they could possibly take necessary actions to handle their assembly line. This is what operational BI would help in solving: a short time window and people at the operations taking immediate decisions.Having said that, traditional BI is important, especially when identifying patterns to formulate strategies. On the other hand, for organizations to operate to the strategies, operational BI is better equipped to address it.In a nutshell:
Operational BI

• Alerting on predefined Key Performance Indicators based on thresholds
• Shorter time window, more operational visibility
• Quick response time
• Information available to the right people at the right time
• Transactional

Traditional BI

• Helps in identifying patterns
• Works on a wider time-window
• More towards formulating strategies
• Deals mainly with historic data

Key areas for success — in general:

• Quality of Data
• Indentifying organizational-specific KPIs
• Aggregation of data from various sources
• Data source format and integration

As you can see, for the latter scenario an approach based on traditional BI may not suffice as the time to react is very short whereas for the former scenario operational BI would not be effective as given the short time window, a strategist may not be able to conclude based on the data points available.

Email Entry Operational BI, Traditional BI

Problem:A BPO organization was having difficulty in identifying the root causes of their poor performance from a profitability perspective. The key concerns were not with customer satisfaction or quality of service. Every quarter they were losing millions despite the high customer satisfaction and with a distributed network of centers across different states the problem got even compounded.

Solution:The company hired a consulting firm to provide a solution to this problem as they could go out of business in another 6 months. The consulting firm identified some key KPIs at a high level which are most significant to any BPO organization: Quality Average Handle Time Customer SatisfactionTo monitor these they needed a tool which could provide them with real-time data which would then help them identify the problem areas. In this case they suggested an Operational BI tool as they wanted a Platform by which they could define the required KPIs (coarse grained as well as fine grained), to evaluate KPIs- they required real-time data and to trigger them based on thresholds, a workflow based tool to orchestrate processes and analyze them and above all have a consolidated dashboard which could give them the right information at the right time.The selection of a proper tool was critical as on an ongoing basis it would provide key insight to the organization even after they (consultants) left.

Gourangi – Operational BIAfter evaluating products in the operational BI space the consultants selected Gourangi as it offered the right set of features to track and resolve operational problems including a BPM suiteIdentifying the problem and resolutionVarious data points were tapped to define the three critical KPIs – Quality, AHT and Customer satisfaction using aggregated values across different centers. To monitor them they provided appropriate thresholds to each of the KPIs along with a Dashboard. They also defined a Workflow to handle anomalies in case the value exceeded the threshold.For a few weeks they monitored the KPIs and found out that the supervisors as well as the managers from most of the centers gave a lot of importance to customer satisfaction. These were more pronounced from the workflow analytics as for each AHT alert (high value) no corrective measures were taken to lower AHT and also the wait time for each task was considerably high.On the other hand customer satisfaction was high as the operators were spending more time with the customers but again quality of Service was low as rather than answering to the point and signing off quickly they entertained questions that were unrelated to the actual reason for the call. This also highlighted the fact that either the operators were not properly trained or they were not equipped to handle customers.The major cause though was still due to a High AHT value as the teams across the states were unable to handle higher volumes of calls on a per day basis. This led to an overall efficiency of 50% - attributing to overall losses.

Key Takeaways:The BPO organization re-aligned their operational and execution policies to keep a balance between the three key KPIs across their centers. Gourangi was implemented across various departments to keep a track of the ongoing activities and also to create a collaborative environment where key individuals from various hierarchies could take decisions by using information - at the right time and maintain the much needed balance between Customer Satisfaction, AHT and Quality.

Email Entry BPO, BPO Case study, OBI, Operational BI