Preparing for a business review often takes as much effort as executive decision making that follow.
But for gaining any clarity about the business performance, numbers have to be drawn from different departments and questions have to be asked for reaching any sort of conclusion.
Let us take for instance the case where the margins in that region have decreased. The finance department will identify the difference but it could be due to sales discounts, product mix, purchasing costs or operating costs. Every department will play its part in explaining that problem and that will require time and another review by the CEO.
The cost goes beyond preparing reports. It includes the time spent across teams investigating the same issue and the attention leaders must give to getting a complete answer.
The work behind a business question
Margin reduction might trigger several analyses. Finance will look at the figures; Sales will focus on the price and products; Operations will try to uncover cost-related reasons. The leadership should have an integrated perspective in order to identify the drivers of profitability.
This analysis is mandatory but not the information gathering and reconciling the findings.
A reduction in that effort gives a clear view of performance for the CEOs without any need for follow-up questions.
How to spend less time investigating & more time deciding?
Of course, the right action will vary based on what is causing the decrease in performance. A decrease due to pricing problems would have a different resolution than one due to increasing procurement costs. Knowing the cause allows the management to concentrate on resolving the actual issue.
Saxon’s CXO Control Tower enables business leaders to analyze business performance with the help of enterprise data and context. Executives can explore the changes in the performance, their causes and follow up without treating each question separately as a new report.
Thus, CXO Control Tower reduces the time period between recognizing a business performance problem and finding out its causes, allowing executives more time for decision-making.
What the numbers show
- 70% faster executive analysis
- 50% less time from question to insight
- 6+ functions and data sources connected per investigation
Such performance measures include the speed of analysis of the executives, time required to gain insight and the scope of information gathered in the investigation process. The actual performance measures will vary depending on the problem under investigation and the information available.
Table of Contents
How CXO Control Tower helps CEOs with executive decision making?
CXO Control Tower enables the executive to pose questions in business terminology and analyze the results without extracting data manually from various reports.
- Ask questions in natural language: Query business metrics such as revenue, planned versus actual performance, sales figures, and project status without searching through spreadsheets or predefined dashboards.
- Bring data from multiple systems together: Connect information from relevant ERP, CRM, sales, HR, and project management systems to get a broader view of business performance.
- Go from summary reports to deep analytics: Begin with the results and supporting references and proceed to the Deeper Analysis feature for trend and anomaly exploration, as well as revenue and performance analysis.
- Explore follow-up questions: Use suggested questions or ask your own to investigate a result further. Request different visualizations to compare performance and examine the data from different angles.
- Reuse recurring business questions: Store common questions in a prompt library so you can easily conduct repeat analyses without repeating the same queries.
- Keep access controlled: User roles enable users to access business information based on their privileges only.
All of these skills will help the managers go beyond analyzing figures and understanding what lies behind them. As a result, the process of creating reports will be much faster and easier and leave more time for analysis.
Put executive time to better use
It is equally essential to make sure that the saved time is being used for something valuable. Less time on repeating the performance questions, more time on prioritizing business needs and making decisions about where to take action.
The objective is not just to receive reports more quickly; the objective is to make sure that answering business questions leads to making decisions in a more efficient manner.
CXO Control Tower helps executives analyze the performance of the enterprise and learn about reasons behind business changes.
With less time spent on searching and collecting the answers, more time can be devoted to making decisions about how to move forward.