Let’s spend some today to discuss Data integration and how it can greatly assist your business to easily obtain data you perhaps never knew existed.
To start, we can define data integration as being the process of bringing data from many (often disparate) sources into a single location; having been transformed to a single format before being loaded to its final destination. This becomes the key prerequisite to powering advanced analytics and generating improved insights into business activities.
In the hospitality industry, companies will inevitably draw data from a number of different systems. F&B data from a POS system; Hotel Reservations and Room assignment from a Hotel System; Gaming Systems; CRM System; Purchasing System; HR Systems and so on… just to name a few. Bringing these data sources together into a single point of truth can yield tremendous insights throughout your business. Imagine taking your F&B data, customer data, hotel data and gaming data from the different silo’s and be able to link customer purchases across all touch points; instantly providing incredible insights into the customer movements and also the products themselves.
Analyzing the menu performance of particular outlet may show poor performing items that you intend to remove for the next menu change; but by having all your data integrated to a single source the intelligence garnered may well show that one or two of your top customers are actually the main users of this item and that removing it may be fraught with danger to other areas of your business.
What about, through the use of AI and prediction; being able to link sales data from the F&B POS to data from the purchasing system to predict the best times to take advantage of seasonality in pricing vs historical sales demand of goods; allowing you to buy better, at the right time and improve margins. Additionally, applying real data algorithms rather than the traditional metric of COGS percentages will provide more accurate indications of leakage and/or wastage within the operation. These are all ways that the data you have already available can be better integrated and used to create efficiencies to improve your bottom line.
What’s more, you can integrate your back office functions such as Finance (forecasts, budgets, and reporting); or HR to assist with staff planning based on individual department sales; employee reporting statistics, leave requirements throughout the business and so much more. All in one location.
VISION Analytics provides complete data integration into its VISION Platform; essentially enabling clients to view all of their organisation’s data in a single platform from a single source; on mobile and desktop; with role level security based on who you want to see what data. Effective data integration enables digitization and the use of Advanced Analytics previously unavailable or just too costly and difficult for SMEs to implement and manage themselves. Removing these silos and replacing with a single point of truth linked with our off-the-shelf or completely customisable Intelligence will provide insights into your business that have never been better, faster, and easier to obtain than ever before.
In Part 2 of this series, we will discuss more about the challenges faced by organisations in integrating their data to obtain meaningful and relevant advanced analytics.
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