Digital tools for effective strategic management

Strategic management always looked for decision-making tools to facilitate its decision-making.

Capturing the data to make the right decision is strategic. Today data is key in strategic management. Integrating your CRM, HRIS, BI, digital workplace and website all together becomes a challenge that goes far beyond the IT department. The process and trades are jostled.

A little bit of history on the strategic management and tools couple

Capturing data to make the right decision is strategic. Today, data is key in strategic management.

This has always been an issue for businesses. The concept of Business intelligence appeared at the end of the 1950s, carried by a computer scientist by the name of Hans Peter Luhn, at IBM. He was probably the inventor of the first algorithms that used a computer to summarize documents and work with numbers. The idea behind it is to leverage accounting, financial and customer data to organize decision making.

The mid-1970s saw the appearance of the first systems for planning material requirements to help industrial companies organize their production. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) was born.

As technology advances and the Internet expands, the amount of data available increases exponentially. The tools adapt and specialize.

Decisional intelligence, based on a detailed analysis of data, is organized in a simple way by algorithms. Thus it becomes possible to make complex decisions while improving productivity.

Therefore, the decision-maker, using these decision-making dashboards, can dispense with database experts and extract the data he needs himself. Better still, all of this data can be accessed by all stakeholders. It makes it possible, thanks to these common indicators, to bring out synergies within the various units of the company, and even among its partners.

These synergies between the different production units can be taken over by operational management or by independent teams to optimize orders, better distribute workloads, free up resources, etc.

CRM and BI, what are the strategic management objectives pursued?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) brings together processes that allow the organization of the business to be adapted in order to be ever more customer-centric.

For its part, BI (Business Intelligence) is focused on data, both internal and external, to generate actionable information in a volatile world and a complex market.

The aim of BI is to help decision making by bringing external information to the market. The CRM must be able for its part to exploit the information of the BI, associate it with internal data and thus make visible the actions to be taken.

Analytical CRM is precisely about preparing the ground and managing the steps that will make the information useful to consolidate, build loyalty, and canvass customers. Therefore, Its objective is to provide a vision of the entire company. The B.I component brings a cross-company / market perspective.

However, CRM without BI doesn’t make sense.

CRM captures the data that passes through all of the company’s information systems. This tool links the order to customer satisfaction. Business Intelligence structures all the data collected, measures discrepancies and highlights anomalies.

The right information is compared to highlight the issues to be solved. For example, the CRM will capture the number of vehicle orders. The BI will compare this information with business ERP, such as equipment orders. The data used will show whether the company can meet this increasing demand without changing its order book. The decision maker can, thanks to this exploited data, decide to double his order intake, to double the production line or to announce an additional production deadline to his customer.

Thus the decision-maker can establish the bases of his [strategic management]. The speed of its decisions have a direct impact on its cash flow, if it decides to increase its orders, on its reputation, if it decides to inform the customer of a longer delivery time.

CRM and BI in their implementation: this is where it gets complicated!

CRM interconnects with the company’s information systems. These have been designed to serve an organizational process. The exploitation of customer data is a recent phenomenon. This involves rethinking its entire production process in order to make visible all customer data known to all information systems.

Remember: industrialization highlights a need to organize tasks to flow activities from one end of the production chain to the other. Through the support processes, purchases and payments from upstream suppliers will be added to the production process. And downstream, delivery, sales and after-sales service will be added to this first production process. These are as many information systems as they are processes that can stack and interact. These systems have been designed to optimize production and organize just-in-time flows. The time between the delivery of material and that of production must be maximized to avoid the storage of goods and optimize cash flow, a source of profit for the company. The systems will therefore at best aggregate or compile data associated with customers. Business Intelligence will analyze this compiled data according to the organization of the company and decisions will be made based on the means of production and not on customer needs.

The reputation and image of the company could be degraded.

When the company’s digital journey is driven by [Customer culture］ what we are going to look for in information is the perception of notoriety. The data to be collected must show waiting times, resolution times, contact times, satisfaction indices not only related to the product but also to the personalization and empathy generated by the reception on the phone, in the store, etc. External information will also be collected in order to know its market reputation on social networks … BI will compile internal customer data and external data to bring out essential information and facilitate complex decisions. For the information provided by BI to be relevant internally as well as externally, it must be structured and thought out before its installation by a [strategic management].

The company that wants to build its CRM according to the uses of its customers must therefore analyze its entire information system and probably plan to overhaul its organization to add this winning duo CRM + B.I.

From this choice will depend its digital strategy and above all the good management of its software expenses and the place it gives to its customers. From a human point of view, strategic management will seek the best compromise or the best human-machine interface …

The strategic management decision support toolbox

Author: Dominique popiolek-Ollé, Transmutation leader, Agile Executive Coach, Founder of In Imago, management consulting and disruptive transformation.