Monitor the Order to Cash Cycle with Microsoft Power BI and the Canvas Cube
The Inefficient Gathering and Processing of Data Within Companies Is A Significant Operational Cost and Slows Down Effective Decision Making by Senior Managers
The Slow Cycle of Data Analysis
Current ERP systems cater for transactional processing of data rather than transactional analytics in the form of monitoring and reporting. The result is that companies employ expensive resources with business science qualifications to analyse data and prepare management reports. This manual method of data analysis is typically executed by “dumping” multiple sources of data into Excel and then spending hours cleaning it and preparing standardised reports. Usually, the process is rushed, with limited time available for doing in-depth analysis. The result is a dated report providing only top-line information that does not help managers make better decisions.
Gain Insight with Real-Time Visualisation
A better way of utilising company-wide data is to automatically load all transactional data from various applications into a central data warehouse and then apply analytics and reporting calculations to it. This process of integrating and normalising data out of multiple sources in a central warehouse creates a data asset for the business that managers can use to gain real-time insight and pro-actively steer the company.
Canvas Intelligence Provides Actionable Insights
With Canvas Intelligence’ The Cube technology, business managers can build analytical models once, and have them updated live. Our process involves migrating all the data that is usually analysed through Excel into the Cube, a central data warehouse that we developed. Within the Cube data is updated live from various sources and visualised using Microsoft’s Power BI tool. Now it is possible to view company-wide data, often stretching into many millions of rows, entirely live and, critically, make sense of it. The Cube literally unlocks the ability to analyse historical trends with statistical analysis. The Canvas Cube presents transactional data live and offers the ability to set alerts on certain analytical KPIs and be notified when tolerances are breached. Building analytics from transactional cubes gives the ability to instantly explore the causal effects of the triggered alert as well drill down to the lowest level. Having all data live enables the business to monitor the past 30 days daily trends, compared to the last 90 days and the last 180 days and benchmarked against budgets, forecasts and rolling 365 days trends. This ability to provide ongoing, in-depth monitoring of short, medium- and long-term daily activities enables actionable analytics and the ability to intervene proactively.
Improve Return on Investment & Return On Management
The Canvas Cube improves the return on investment by providing live data and the ability to monitor all business processes real time instead of first having to dump static sets of data and analyse it. The time saving is significant! An example of how the Cube provides tangible ROI is in helping companies reduce their order to cash cycle. Research shows that a sustained 7-day improvement in the cash conversion cycle of a business has a 2% increase effect on EBITDA%, not to mention the qualitative aspects of such an improvement. The Cube also enhances the return on management from freeing-up expensive time from highly skilled managers who are now able to spend time on taking actions based on data insight instead of using valuable time trying to collate, clean and interpret it. Additional functionality in the form of a mobile app that displays the data wherever a manager is and being able to collaborate and discuss data alerts with fellow managers instantly provides additional productivity enhancements.
