Business Intelligence: To compete you need a competitive advantage

Since its inception, the idea behind Business Intelligence (BI) was to provide quick access to quality data so that business executives could take action to minimize the errors or capture an opportunity. However in reality, the data was although properly rendered but right context remained missing. This brought up the ground reality that to capture right information, the mechanism has to be designed correctly.

When we talk of BI we should differentiate it by two aspects :

• The first is the business aspect of BI — the need to get the most value out of information. This need hasn’t really changed in over years but increasing complexity has made it harder to deliver.

• The second is the IT aspect of BI — what technology is precisely able to cater the business needs.

Your should be aware of the following :-

• Make sure your data is scrubbed and current, or the analytics will always deliver irrelevant intelligence.

• Data to be converted into information, keeping in view, the presentation of that information. It should be configured to render a comprehensive view of the situation at a glance.

• Need identification and your idea behind getting those information must be clear to you.

In old days it was called Decision support system which, with time matured and became Business Intelligence & Business Analytics. It has gone further to the level where it has not just remained technology driven but became business oriented and actionable.

I still remember when I was in a manufacturing ERP company and I was explained by the Managing director of that company about the “PADTA system”, used in old days, which was nothing but a business at a glance report at the end of the day. Just a small slip explaining the cost, profit and end result of the business for an organization. I realized that the need of BI and its uses were already in place but it just got matured and became technology driven.

At the end of the day, nobody cares what this stuff is called. If you’re a business owner then what matters is to work out the best way to gather the information opportunity in your organization, and putting in place appropriate technology to meet that business need on which you will be able to take decisions.

However “To Compete You need a competitive Advantage”

MEDSOLIS, Inc, a US based healthcare company and Advanz101 have partnered to develop new products

MEDSOLIS, Inc, a US based healthcare company and Advanz101 have partnered to develop new products for the health care market. Under the terms of the agreement, Advanz101 will invest in MEDSOLIS’ product development to facilitate faster time to market of MEDSOLIS products. MEDSOLIS product suite consists of care management, patient engagement and physician communication products to enable delivery of value based health services. MEDSOLIS products are cloud based web applications along with smart device modules and remote biometric monitors. This partnership will result in joint office locations in Dallas & San Jose in the US and development centers in Pune and Indore in India.

About MEDSOLIS, Inc

MEDSOLIS, Inc is a Healthcare software products company that is focused on creating a collaborative platform for consumer management. Committed to simplicity and innovation, MEDSOLIS is developing products to enhance clinician and consumer engagement by combining proven care coordination practices with the latest technology coupled with recent industry changes. 

Increase in consumer ownership will be a determining factor to address many of the healthcare industry challenges, including avoidable 30 day readmissions and management of chronically ill individuals for ACOs and Payers. MEDSOLIS believes that the industry cost and the technology curve, aided by regulatory forces, have reached a tipping point to make this elusive goal a reality, and is committed to deliver easy to use, action oriented technology products to achieve that goal. 

About ADVANZ101

ADVANZ101 is a MR Reporting software and Software for pharma services company that provides solutions to Business Intelligence challenges faced by small, medium and large businesses.  ADVANZ101 has a team of professionals with expertise in Sugarcrm custom apps and Custom application development, project management, CRM, BI, Mobile field force reporting software and Mobile application development and Data integration. Over the years, ADVANZ101 has worked with partners and customers to ensure the utmost customer satisfaction by providing pro-active customer support and quality services.

Any successful partnership requires a shared vision and utilization of the strengths of the partners to achieve the defined objectives. ADVANZ101's technical expertise in Java technology stack, functional knowledge in Customer Service, Fmcg software for sales, HR and its commitment to excellence  will complement MEDSOLIS's efforts in building an innovative Healthcare software product

Business Intelligence (BI) For Middle East Pharma Companies

Middle East is growing rapidly when it comes to the pharma industries and has shown a tremendous development over the last few years. The pharma companies have to deal with the data on the life sciences that can get quite big and are the backbone of the pharma business. To manage this data you need an efficient Business Intelligence that not only manages it taking into consideration every business aspect but also helps you in the determination of success and failure. The data hold a lot of information and should be exploited in an effective way so as to make all the right analytics work into the favour of the company along with the objectives that complaint with the growth and the overall sales. To achieve the success in the pharma field and generate revenue you need right softwarefor pharma along with the Mobilefield force reporting software and we help you to find all answers and give you solutions that gives you what you look for. With us you can:

• Helps you into the transformation of sales and operations.
• Increased efficiency in sales and marketing tactics along with the better strategy planning.
• Better product approval workflow along with the management of the data.
• Reduction in costs and time savings.
• Helps in the reduction of risks and gives you a better view on the management with better handling of data.

We help you establish a better understanding with the management along with the transparency in the information and the data involved. The pharma industry needs to maintain its working and ability on timely basis and our BI and fmcg Software for sales helps to churn out the real time information with accurate p recession at every phase of the sales and production. Business Intelligence now is the most essential part of the Pharma Industry in the east as it helps in the information transparency amongst the project managers and helps them at every stage in making better decisions along with the senior managers in the development of the company’s future. Our BI helps you in the following areas:

1. Agile Business Decisions:
   Pharma industry involves complex data and with our customizedERP, sugarcrmcustom apps and Business Intelligence, you can make valuable decisions and working patterns quite easily. It helps you in the gathering, maintaining, categorizing and distributing the data in the workflow within the pharma company. It leaves no room for error which helps you in the seamless business operations.

2. Helps you to remain competitive:The Business Intelligence helps you a lot when you wish to stay ahead of the competition. As Pharma industry is growing and getting bigger day by day, the technology plays a vital role in the development and the research perspective. It helps you in the management of the operations and directs your sales to ensure you achieve the target and fulfil the need of your clients.

3. Improvement in Sales:The role of the raw and the customer data plays a vital role in the Pharma industry. With the use of Business Intelligence you can seamlessly accommodated the entire data in your workflow in order to manage the entire working in a very efficient manner. This improves the overall sales as the operations become effective.

4. 
   
   Better Customer Relations:As the management of the company is done in a better way, you are able to give flawless services to your clients which in turn results in the customer loyalty. The BI helps you to track the customer problems, their needs and choices. The growth of the company depends on the fact that how it is in tune with its client base.

Business Intelligence For Middle East Pharma Companies

SugarCRM Integration with Any Billing Software

SugarCRM, customerrelationship management (CRM) platform, is a well-known leader in open source CRM and is used to manage leads, sales opportunities and build stronger customer relationships which results in higher conversion rates in sales. In any sales organization – Insides sales, Field sales and Account management teams are the biggest users of CRM. Customer service (support team) is another team which uses CRM application extensively.

Sales teams use CRM to build new account relationship - by maintaining customer information, creating targeted campaigns, identifying leads generated from campaign, different stages in opportunities,  different interactions with customer etc- all this helps in finding existing and future needs of the customer. CRM can be used by sales team to forecast revenues and predict customer expectations as well as buying behavior.

Customer service representatives (CSRs) use CRM extensively to capture the call details, resolution of issues and improve the customer satisfaction.  All the calls(phone or email) and interactions with the customer can be recorded inCRM. Looking at past, interactions are in most cases useful in resolving customer’s current issue. CRM can be used as a ticketing system where issue raised by client becomes a ticket which gets assigned to a service rep. CRM workflows can assign ticket intelligently to the service rep based on skill set and availability. A CRM is useful to CSRs as they can not only see historical interactions with the customer but can also find out which service rep worked with the customer previously and how issues were resolved. CSRs and Sales reps CRM can help in up-sell and cross-sell of the product offerings.

SugarCRM should be set up in such a way that it is utilized for day-to-day operations. This will be possible if customer eccentric data from different functions like billing, transportation, distribution is gathered and displayed in CRM. It will make CRM much more effective and also enable companies to utilize the full extent of CRM.  The information collected from other systems is invaluable to both sale steams and service representatives. This data can assist sales team from moving leads through the sales process - building proposals,facilitate order booking and improve collections. This can also help in developing targeted campaigns and getting detailed picture of your customers.

One of the prominent integration points with SugarCRM is any billing software. Billing system has details about the invoices, receipts and customer returns. This assists sales teams to ensure they are meeting their targets in terms of collections. CSRs use this information to attend to customer queries. Having the billing system details in CRMwill provide a single integrated view for CSRs and Sales reps for e.g.CRM can get key invoice information e.g. invoice amount, last invoice,invoice status, discounts offered on the last order from billing systems and sales reps can use this information to complete their sale.

SugarCRM and Billing systems can be integrated in a way that sales report service rep may not have to log in to two different applications to get the details. We can also ensure that the data in both SugarCRM and Billing is in sync at all times and users of both applications will see the current information.

Integration's like this can enhance CRM tools functionality exponentially and make sales and service teams operate efficiently.

Advantages of Business Intelligence

A good business intelligence tool can collect data from different sources, combine the relevant information, and present it to the management. Reports coming out of CRM, ERP, SFA, or a point of sale tool is not enterprise business intelligence, sure there can be some intelligence built into reporting, but these reports work in silos and reports are incomplete. For management, to make decision they need all the information consolidated in front of them. For making a good informed decision - data may come from various different sources CRM, ERP, POS, SFA, etc. This is where enterprise business intelligence comes into play.

The main advantages of business intelligence are:

• Creates intelligence out of available data.

Looking at transactional data may not reveal much, there may be so much information in the data and business intelligence is the tool to pull all this information out. Data can tell you about the health of business, information about specific products, sales in territory, employees' performance, campaign effectiveness - possibilities are limitless.

Provides insight into current operations: Business intelligence can be very effectively used to manage company operations, e.g. looking at reports filled by field sales staff from different territories, analysis can be done on specific sales representative.

Helps in making easier and faster decision by providing various perspectives: Rather than looking for information and waiting for days to get all the facts, with Business Intelligence, all the pertinent information will be available to decision makers on their finger tips.

Works on historic records: All the historical records stored in the company's files are rarely looked at - Business Intelligence can churn out important information from past records - e.g. when did a company default on its payments or how did products sale do three years back when it rained as heavy as projected to rain this year.

Provides trend analysis: Business intelligence can look at all the historical records and can provide trend analysis, which can be a very important tool to look at the direction of the company.

Can pull data from discrete sources of data: Business intelligence can pull data from different sources and present it to the user in unified way.

Summarization, slicing & dicing, interactive dashboards with drill down, navigation and graphical presentations: This is another great advantage of business intelligence - rather than looking at all the transactions and only sums/totals. In business intelligence, user can start at a dashboard which can give summarization of key KPIs and from there user can slice & dice into which ever detail they are interested in. Here the information can also be presented in nice graphical form which can convey its meaning at first glance e.g. small things like this month's negative sales as compared to last year this month can be highlighted in red.

Reporting does not impact performance of transactional system: Business intelligence reports does not have any negative impact on transactional systems (like ERP, SFA, CRM) performance. This system works separate from transactional systems.

CRM/ERP not a must - can work on CONVENTIONAL data: Business intelligence can get information from any custom conventional data sources as well. It does not necessarily need enterprise application like ERP, CRM or SFA.

Business Intelligence

TenWays to Increase Sales Numbers using SFA

Sales Force Automation makes very easy to handle the complete sales process. SFA not only increases sales force efficiency and improve customer service (which it does); it improves sales numbers as well. This can be applied on all companies of any size with sales staff from fewer to hundreds and thousands, of all regions' selling product or services.

SFA can help companies to increase their sales numbers. In other words, SFA software can be used as an information system that allowsa company to deal more effectively with the process for converting prospects into purchasers in an individual way, customer by customer.

 Ten ways in which SFA can help companies to increase their sales are:

1.       Define a Sales Process: Companies can define sales process, tailored for the industry and works for them. Once the process is defined, SFA can be used to implement the process. SFA will make sure that all the leads follow theirdefined sales process and it will provide a way for management to monitor if sales process was properly followed or not.

2.       Keep Sales Team Members Informed: Using SFA, all team members in a territory will know about the prospects, sales representatives are working on. By this way, multiple sales representatives will not contact the same prospect and negatively impact the opportunity with the prospect.

3.       Keep Management Informed: Via SFA, management will know where team members are and what they are working on, which accounts/prospects are being looks at, which products, territories are targeted. SFA gives management a chance to view sales activity in almost real time and make sure it aligns with companies goals. Management can also look at sales reps load/work method and help align it.

4.       Reviews: SFA can be used to see how sales representatives are doing and let them know about it. Sales representatives' performance can be compared to their targets to see how good they are doing. Using SFA system, sales representatives and management can benchmark their performance and find areas of improvement.

5.       Management Reporting: With SFA maintained properly, sales representative will not be asked to report their daily/weekly activities separately to management - SFA will do that job. Reports can be simplified and easily obtained from SFA and letting sales team focuson sales.

6.       Work Together: SFA can help teams to collaborate and work together during the sales process - this may be especially important in working on a big account. Multiple sales representatives can work together using SFA. This will help to share their experiences, contacts, and methodology vice versa.

7.       Contact Management: SFA can help you track prospects decision tree - companies can keep information about decision makers, influencers, etc. of the prospect. SFA can help you keep track of important information about all the contacts.

8.       Alerts: SFA sends alerts to sales representatives about their important meetings during the sales cycle or on the next step or to touch base with important prospect / client if sales staff has not done so in a long time. Alerts can also be generated for middle management to let them know about progress and lackingwithin different territories across various products lines.

9.       Share Documents: SFA can be leveraged to share sales and marketing documents among the sales team. While working on a prospect, sales representatives can leverage work done by others in the team/across the team. It will save time and improve efficiency of the sales team.

10.   Mobile Applications: SFA mobile applications can be leveraged to help sales team when they are on the field. Mobile phones' GPS can be used within SFA app to generate intelligent alert and tracking etc. It can also be used as a tool for sales team to work efficiently.

Mobile field force reporting software-customized ERP- SFA and Mobile Apps

 Mobile usage is rapidly growing around the world. Users have started spending more time on non voice usage of phone. This trend has caught up throughout the world. When mobile phones came more than twenty years ago they revolutionized communication and now they are being used for another revolution.

 Companies in the last few years have used mobile applications(apps) to make inroads in the consumer market. These mobile apps are available in varying categories - games, lifestyle, social networking, productivity, news etc. With growth of social media and ability of mobile devices to add location to the products have fundamentally changed how users engage socially and the manner in which they purchase goods and services.

 Companies have started using mobile platform in enterprise segment as well. Companies are encouraging employees to bring your own device (BYOD). With BYOD, companies have to manage the security risks mobile phones poses to the enterprise data, but are outweighed by the convenience it brings to the employees. Most companies have started defining mobile strategies both for internal employees and for its consumers. Sales force automation (SFA) in one area is catching in the enterprise mobile space.

 Advanz101 mobile SFA app has been developed for sales team and field force. This app can be used to submit a daily call report (DCR), edit a DCR, and review real time data including other things. Most of these tasks were previously possible either on paper or using a laptop. Some key benefits of the app are listed below.

 Ease:  Mobile app improves operational efficiency of the complete sales team. With the app, sales team can enter a DCR using mobile from the field without having to wait for end of day or end of week to get in front of computer. This has made operational work easy for the sales rep. It also decreases errors on DCR and delays in submission of DCR. With this app sales person can even enter DCR while waiting in Doctors office.

 Reach: Mobile app increases companies reach within the sales team. Team can get proactive alerts which help them in multiple ways. With sales team all over the field it gets difficult to communicate across to multiple sales representatives at the same time.  Using mobile app company can reach out to all the sales rep or a set of sales rep whenever they want to - this gives them flexibility with mass communications within the organization. Important announcement, product related info, territory information etc can be sent to this app so that when user logs in they will have visibility.

History: App can be used to check historic information. Past records can be accessed any time to give insight into history e.g. before talking to a retailer, field person can check retailer's historic transactions and be prepared for the conversation.

Real Time: For sales team, business is on the road and decisions need to be made quickly. With ability to see real time information on the go puts business on the fingertips. With mobile app users can get real time updates on orders, opportunities, customers etc. Data updated by mobile apps from the field gives middle management instant visibility on field activity of the sales team.

The way consumer apps have transformed how we access information in our day to day personal lives, business apps will transform how we conduct business. Business apps have potential of taking us away from desktops/paper and give power in our Mobile phones so that we can take care of business anywhere and anytime.

Business Intelligence- customized ERP- SFA Business analysis platform

Pharma companies have started gathering more and more information about customer relationships through Sales force automation(SFA) tools. Information is available in tools but to get something meaningful out of it may take a lot of time and effort. That’s where Business intelligence(BI) comes into picture - BI as a tool can look through all the data and come up with meaningful answers in a very short time. In this blog we have tried to cover some of the analysis that can be done on SFA data.

Sales analysis : 

Access to cumulative sales figures on a daily / weekly basis is very useful for sales team. Field force and middle management can look at sales data to see if the direction they are moving aligns with the companies goal. Sales data can give insight into :

Which sales rep are performing to meet the target
Which regions are continuously reported in the bottom 10 for the last quarter
Which head quarters contributed the most to the total sales in a territory
Which three products are our top selling products of the month in the west region
Which HQ have insufficient list of Active Doctors and Retailers.


Product analysis:

Company can slice and dice sales effort and figures to find how products are doing across geographies. It can give insight into specific products, product categories, focus products etc. Product data can be used to shape product strategy as whole and different plans for separate regions. Some of the key questions that can be answered:

Which products are forecasted to meet the target?
How many SKUs are showing de-growth
Which SKUs achieved target in the last month
List of new products that were not sampled in a region
Product is exposed to which type of Doctor Specialization

Expense analysis:
Expense has to be kept under control to keep companies profitable. Analysis on expenses is required so that it does blow out and becomes a surprise at the year end. Expense should be monitored as it takes pace, some answers that management will need for expenses are :

In which 5 areas expenses increased by more than 50% as compared to last year
How does increase in expense co-relate with sales increase
Which head quarters have good sales to expense ratio
Expense analysis by different expense categories
Product / geography specific expense analysis

Outstanding analysis:

Companies need to be on top of outstanding in the market. Business intelligence can get appropriate information to keep outstanding in balance. Key things to monitor:

Outstanding aging analysis

Cash flow v/s Sales for different regions
Top customers with pending outstanding
Outstanding for customers as compared to average monthly sales
Outstanding analysis by region

Doctors analysis

Doctors are key to every pharma companies sales plan be it for new product introductions or pushing the current products. In that regard it is important to keep a close tab on sales reps ( or medical representatives) in the field. Product detailing and product sampling metrics becomes a good way to get insight into companies interaction with doctors.

How many Class A doctors were not visited in last month even once
CRM Doctors, their coverage and feedback
What type of Doctors are covered in product detailing 
Which doctors were visited more than the required visits
How many of focus products were sampled in the last quarter

This is just the tip of iceberg, there is so much more that can be done with the data that pharma companies have. Business intelligence can give insights which will be impossible for a human eye. Moreover ease of using various reports make it very useful for Top and middle management.