A company that is still using old school methods to determine their investment strategies is placing themselves at a great disadvantage considering all the progress that technology has made over the recent years. These new advancements allow for better insight into investment decisions that greatly improve productivity and performance. Older methods for making these decisions have many flaws that result in inaccuracy that hinders a company’s bottom line in the end.
Data Scraping Moves You Out of the Stone Age
Data gathering methods such as web data scraping, provide capabilities and information access that previously wasn’t available even a decade ago. New technologies, such as web data scraping, provide the ability to gather, aggregate, and analyze unstructured data as well as new types of data that were previously more difficult to acquire and quantify. Among these are imagery and language. This capability provides businesses with an enhanced capacity to make more informed investment decisions that will benefit their business performance and productivity.
Know What You Should Spend and Where You Should Spend it
With the increase of available data and the ability to harvest and analyze that data in a speedy manner, companies are provided new methods to define and capitalize on productive investment opportunities. Valuations, market trends, research data, and momentum are able to be better informed now than ever before with the application of big data technologies. Big data provides a significant competitive edge by taking strategic business making decisions beyond conventional means.
The ability to strategically analyze that data in a way that provides meaningful and actionable insights is what provides real world, real time value. Data evaluation techniques look to apply the insights acquired through data harvesting and analysis to get a good grip on past and current performance of pricing strategies, product sales, inventory management, etc.
Improve Sales Strategies
These insights allow companies to evaluate and tweak their strategies to improve product sales performance, identify where and specific ways to cut costs, and inventory investment decisions. Having access to such methods offers particularity to general concepts surrounding corporate goals, making them easier to realize. For example, harvesting and analyzing a specific set of data on a specific product provides specific insights on sales and pricing performance. This can then hone in on what customer group in specific areas. With a better idea as to customer purchasing patterns and behaviors, you can then construct predictive models. This will then allow a business to be optimized for improved performance.
In addition to identifying ways to increase the ROI and performance of current products and activities, you can also reduce current costs. Such information extraction and analysis can point out other areas of potential opportunities for productive investment.
Improved Customer Relations
With machine learning techniques, predictive models to target where to apply a given consumer incentive strategy can be utilized. This gives insight on where to optimize pricing revenues with more targeting pricing and informed cost perspective. Such customer incentive programs can be tailored to acquire new customers and reward repeat business with discounts and other possible incentives. This is made more successful through the informed application of consumer data and analytics.
More insightful data about who your customers are also helping to improve the performance of your sales funnel by improving the quality of contact with customers and prospective customers. It can also mean applying experience to customer service reality and bettering the rate of customer retention.
Better Inventory Management Improves Liquidity and Prevents Holding Old Inventory
Better product performance insights can mean a more efficient inventory management by having a more informed reorder point. If a company tries to use outdated methods to set their reorder points, the end results can be disastrous!
They can go through a period of having inventory sit on shelves in a warehouse and tie up said companies liquidity at the expense of the rest of the company’s operational cost. This not only hurts investor relations, but also hinders performance in other areas where the money was needed such as advertising or growth. Having inventory sit on a shelf long enough can result in products that are time sensitive such as pharmaceuticals expiring. Industrial products can become obsolete resulting in wasted money.
On the other hand, waiting to late to reorder, or having a low reorder point will result in stock out. This causes not only panic on the sales floor, but damages customer relations. A company in a state of stock out could not only lose current business, but may also lose long time loyal customers. This will then result in overcompensation by ordering too much of said goods, thus leading to a never ending inventory see-saw routine. A better inventory management means avoiding the expense and hassles associated with overstock or stock out scenarios, and more efficient lead times. Having the right amount of inventory and recording only the right amount at the right time means that your company never suffers a stock out and yet at the same time has more money on hand for operational cost and a better investor payout resulting in higher stock prices.
Don’t Continue to Suffer Nineteenth Century Problems
By using twenty-first century technology these are problems of the past, just a bad memory. By data crawling you are able to use information extraction and then use this to make informed business decisions. The big data that you need is out there, you just have to obtain it. By using web data scraping to harvest the information, you are no longer shooting in the dark when making these crucial decisions that affect the performance of your company. Data harvesting means that your company has all the tools necessary to make wise investment decisions! Even a company with a good reputation and good customer relations can still be under performing if they aren’t putting their money in the right places of operation at the right times. Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions in the comment section below.
