Does Your Tech Stack Influence Your Ability To Make Data Driven Decisions In Your Business?

The first question we need to ask is, what kind of decision making are we talking about?

• Is it day to day Operational Decisions such as purchasing and demand planning, understanding and segmenting customers on behaviour or buying history, reviewing suppliers, sales, channels, best sellers/slow movers, employee performance or profit margins to name but a few?
• Perhaps we are talking about Strategic Planning that may include but is not limited to analysing financial and overheads data, considering which markets to operate in, which regions or countries or which partnerships and strategic alliances to pursue?
• Operational and Strategic Planning are very different activities and require different data sets. One thing is true of both, accessing this data shouldn’t be the equivalent of winning a game on Gladiators!

At Stok.ly we talk about simplifying process, simplifying your tech stack and simplifying the number of stakeholders you manage.

• Creating seamless collaboration between teams, united on one platform, creates an environment where all the data of a business is collected in one central hub and can be presented in custom reports and dashboards. One system with one view of your business. This has the potential to make an enormous difference to operational and strategic decision making.
• If you go one step further and add in your marketing, accounting and financial data, all plugged into one reporting platform, you can gain a single view of your business.

So here is a real world example;

A prospect recently contacted us to see if we could help reduce their high return rates on eCommerce sales. As we started to dig into their data, we asked some basic questions to gather quantitative data.

Could they tell us:

Simple questions, but not easy to answer if your tech stack is spread across multiple suppliers, apps and platforms and the data is not available in a standardised, normalised format.

These questions require data from Warehouse Management, Product Information Management and Order Management.
The prospect in this case simply couldn’t answer these basic questions because they did not have easy access to all the data required in a standardised and usable format.

Can your teams collaborate on one platform and access the data required to make data driven operational and strategic decisions?

If not, then reviewing your tech stack and access to critical data is probably a critical action if you are attempting to scale or simply remain competitive in a challenging environment.