We have provided below the kind of strategic questions which a BI tool can answer:

How can we advance our brand into the top 10 in terms of market share?

As a strategic business development objective, a business may decide they wish to increase the number of clients across all market sectors by 10%, year on year over a five year period. Specific initatives may be to offer products on loss basis to the first five new clients in each market sector. BI reporting can identify which market sectors are proving to be difficult, and therefore need a new marketing approach.

How can we reduce our overheads?

An example of an objective for a new financial strategy may be to improve the reliability of a given product to a specific threshhold, perhaps 80%. A specific initiative to achieve the objective might be to identify components which fail to meet a minimum threshhold of failures within warranty. Components which consistently fail to meet the threshhold would be candidates for further analysis, perhaps resulting in new suppliers being sourced. BI can assist by maintaining trends and exception reports, automatically notifying managers where components fail to meet minimum standards.

How can we reduce churn in our client base?

The business may be experiencing an unacceptable level of customer attrition, and wish to define a strategic client management objective of reducing the number of customers who discontinue placing orders by 20% over a 12 month period. One initiative the business may take would be to introduce incentives where a customer maintains a given number of product orders. BI can assist in maintaining reports of how well the initiative is working, on a regional basis.

How can we reduce delays in the supply chain?

Management may perceive that lines of supply have deteriorated, and wish to manage supply more effectively. A new strategic supplier management objective of reducing delivery delays due to suppliers by 25% over the next 12 months is set, and an initiative of finding two additional backup component suppliers for key products. A BI tool can assist in maintaining a scorecard updated monthly, and showing the number of deliveries delayed by more than a given number of days due to third parties.