Decision support

So far, in the Company X, the BI tool has mainly served the purpose of infor-mation sharing and visualization of data. The tool has been used to generate more or less standardized reports providing the end-users with some level of capability to manipulate data and generate their own reports. According to all stakeholders interviewed, there is still a lot of potential in the tool yet to be rec-ognized in terms of decision support.

However, the interviewees also recognized that there are few factors slightly hindering the benefit realization. Firstly, the tool is relatively new and, therefore, there are functionalities that are yet to be discovered and utilized. In addition, according to the Head of Brain, the lack of planning in advance what data is stored and how it should be stored makes it challenging to ramp up new analysis in a timely manner to meet the demands of the stakeholders.

Regarding decision-making specifically, the CFO and the business control-ler both state that there is a need for more deep-dive analysis. Currently the tool does not necessarily enable finance users to drill down into the data so that they would be able to come up with deeper analysis of some KPIs and clearly recog-nize the drivers of the figures.

“As a controller it is my job to think how we can increase our revenue. To do that, I need to know how our staff can scale up to meet our value propositions to our customers

to gain in revenue so that I’m able to cover all the expenses and salaries. Combining all this data so that the tool would enable me to analyze that when a customer is behaving according to a certain pattern, I would be able to easily point out the focus areas and plan the actions. These are the kind of questions that better integration between BI and ac-counting systems could solve, but I’m not sure how to do that.” (Business controller, 2020.)

This prevents, for example the business controller from being able to an-swer the business stakeholders’ follow-up questions on the monthly results as detailed and accurate as she would need to. Thus, there is no option but to con-duct high-level analysis based on assumptions instead of facts.

“As long as the discussion is on high level, it is clear, but if I’m asked what is the impact of our three most recent marketing campaigns to the customer behavior or how it shows in the customer activity or in the number of new customers, it gets difficult. I am still able to calculate on high level, but the deep-diving is missing.” (Business controller, 2020.)

“You are able to barely meet the deadlines but then someone asks why some figure is the way it is, and you are like…I don’t know, maybe we should have one resource that would focus on analysis. The schedules are tight so there is no time left for analyzing the figures which, after all, is the key thing to move forward.” (CFO, 2020.)

According to the Head of Brain, the Brain team does support finance to some extent in digging behind the numbers. Finance is able to answer to most of the follow-up questions about the month-end results as the reports are compre-hensive enough for the simple questions. However, sometimes there can be rela-tively big deviations between the month actuals and forecasts. In these cases, the task falls on Brain team’s desk to find out the explanations to where the deviances are stemming from.

“We are not directly participating in the month-end closing unless there are ques-tions about the figures. Most of the time they [finance] know because some of the infor-mation is in the reports, but we may have some discrepancies. For example, we collect less fees on online stores, but we didn’t see the number of stores decreasing so why is that, is there a problem with the report, is the data correct or not. And there will be action from finance asking can we spend more time try to figure out with them why our revenue decreased or increased.” (Head of Brain, 2020.)

“Whenever we need to sort of dive into the reports, look into what happened and what changed, then the Brain team is in very high demand.” (Business controller, 2020.) Finance highlights that there is also a need for more predictive analytics.

Most of the current analysis done in the company are backward-looking. The CFO states that while backward-looking is important to see how we have per-formed historically and how our performance has been developing, the decisions

made today are not made for events of yesterday, but they consider tomorrow and the future in general. Therefore, we need to put more focus on predictivity and forecasting capabilities.

“From our point of view, perhaps the most important thing is that we can identify trends so that in decision-making we can consider where we are headed towards so that we can adjust accordingly. Historical data is important, but if we only look into the his-tory, that does not work.” (CFO, 2020.)

Currently the visibility to financial results during a month period is poor.

In addition, in the month-end result review meetings the focus is too heavily on the historical performance. If the visibility to the resulting performance of the period was better, the management would be able to focus more on the future instead of looking back as at the moment.

“Adding more predictivity to the BI tool so that we are not only able to set the expectations but also to monitor whether we will be able to meet our goal or not. In addi-tion, if we were able to increase predictivity, we would not have to wait until the month-end to start thinking about the next month. Increasing the real-time monitoring could allow us to focus more on the coming instead of focusing mainly on the past.” (Business controller, 2020.)

The analysis that is currently done by the Brain team is mainly text analysis, for example, on NPS comments. For analysis, the Brain team will use BI tool to extract data and conduct the analyses. However, the amount of analysis done at the moment is low, but there is intention to increase analysis work. The main reason for the narrow scope of current analysis is that the data points needed for most analysis cases are unknown or inexistent because the data is either not being collected or the data is collected but not stored in applicable format. Due to this, the Brain team is not able to support to the desired extent in forecasting certain measures and conduct predictive analyses.

Moreover, the Head of Brain states that it is difficult for them to provide full support to all stakeholders requesting for support.

“Our team consists of five employees including me and we wouldn’t be able to pro-vide all the different reports and analyses for each department to make the best decisions.”

(Head of Brain, 2020.)

The Head of Brain further adds that his team’s goal is to spread the knowledge about the IT solutions and data so that stakeholders would be able to create their own reports and dashboards and conduct their own analyses – achieving the state where the BI tool can function as a self-service tool.

BI also has another role regarding decision-making in the case company.

Not only does it support decision-making by giving the management insights of the business, but it also supports the justification of the management decisions as mentioned in the previous sub-section. Information availability for all employees

and enabling them to be up to date to whatever is going on in the company and its business, significantly cuts down the time and effort for management to rea-son their decisions to the staff.

Information availability also means that the employees can find the answers to whatever questions they might have by themselves meaning that there will be fewer overlapping questions about the same topic to the management. Further-more, information transparency across the organization is also considered to en-able faster implementation of management decisions throughout the organiza-tion.