Data plays a critical role in every organisation, particularly within our own business where the nature of the assignments we undertake means that both client and candidate data needs to be correctly managed to not only ensure confidentiality but also to enable us to access our extensive candidate network when carrying out search assignments.

In this article, Natasha Volkk, Head of Management Recruitment at Moon Executive Search sits down with Dominic Jephcott, Founder and Managing Partner at Vendigital to demystify the challenges around using operational and financial data effectively.

Introduction

Every business strives to operate in the most efficient, effective manner but what does that mean in real terms? More importance than ever is being placed on the data a business generates and how this data can be used to drive operating efficiencies, delivering immediately measurable improvements to an organisation’s profit margins.

A key challenge is that the average business generates more data than it could ever analyse with any real effectiveness, and expert data scientists who understand how to manipulate the data are often not sat in-house alongside the industry experts asking optimal questions of the data. So where do you start if you want to identify margin improvements and true operating efficiency? You’ll need to call in experts who have the sector knowledge to understand what to look for, the data skills to turn hypotheses into insights and then implementation skills to deliver the benefits of the insights. This is the capability set that the consultancy Vendigital brings to its clients.

Dominic, why is such a spotlight being placed on the importance of data?

Driven by the digital revolution, businesses are now generating reams of data, so the challenge is threefold; how do you organise it, how do you analyse it, and how do you manipulate it to gather actionable insights?

Traditional reporting techniques cannot effectively manipulate the level of data most modern businesses produce but the data science skills and the programming capabilities that are readily available now can. You can take massive data sets and combine them with specific industry knowledge to create innovative insights that were near impossible to discern before.

For example, you likely have procurement spend data, sales data, and inventory data; these are all enormous data sets, and typically, organisations analyse them individually. Today, you can combine them to create dynamic data sets that are up to date and ‘live’ so that you can identify opportunities in real time.

It is important to remember that data sets do not have to be perfect to identify where the opportunities lie. You will likely need to refine or cleanse the data before looking to derive impactful insights from it, but you can get value out of data that’s imperfect. For example, by taking spend data from procurement and combining it with sales data to ascertain your gross margin data, you can start predicting future margins from your historic purchasing prices and sales forecasts.

Putting data into perspective

We demonstrate to organisations the measurable impact their current data can have to their bottom-line.

For example, an organisation buys 50 units of a product for a 10% discount, but the company really only has demand for 20 units right now. Is that a 10% saving or have they paid 2.5 times more than they should have and put in surplus stock that will need to be written off? Digging through historic demand patterns, future forecasts, historical promotion discounting impacts and relevant market data starts to deliver the answer and determine what to do with the surplus and what to do next time.

Now, imagine you source hundreds of thousands of products. If you can join this process up using data and automatically identify the corrective actions and insights to adapt behaviour in the future, you will quickly achieve substantial savings.

Another example from the print media industry are challenges facing printers/distributors. There are over 50,000 newsagents across the UK expecting to receive (on average) 50 publications each day. These are perishable goods because within 12 hours they must be recycled and replaced with the next day’s news. They are given to the newsagents on a sale or return basis, and more often than not, even though the newsagents know they’ll sell a lesser quantity, they’ll take extras ‘just in case’. 12 hours later the newsagents typically hand back a number of papers to the distributors which they’ll have to scrap, diminishing profits.

This is a real example in which we reviewed over four hundred million lines of data, and by taking into account typical buying and recycling patterns, school holidays, elections, sporting events that drive people to buy newspapers etc; we created a clear picture as to how printers and distributors should supply each newsagent across the country without waste, dramatically improving our clients profit margins.

Adding value

Organisations are generating more data than ever before, and this trend is set to continue. Part of the value that management consultants can bring is their ability to benchmark data and opportunities both within and cross-industries. For example, we’ve seen the opportunities afforded to Retail clients given the production and personalisation challenges which the automotive industry faced many years ago. Organisations should expect consultancies to deliver results, not reports. And by analysing and manipulating data we can add real value that is underpinned by quantifiable results.

“Dominic, many thanks for sharing these insights with us. When put into real life examples it’s easy to see the positive impact that insights driven from data can have on an organisation. It’s also fascinating to understand how technology and increased processing power has made such a positive change to how we manage data”, comments Natasha.

In an economic climate where businesses need to stay agile and keep innovation at the forefront in-order to remain competitive, it is easy to see how data will continue to play an important role in driving operational efficiencies. It will be interesting to see how the interplay between AI and humans develops in this area; would AI be able to extrapolate the same human insight from data? This will certainly impact on the job roles of the future.  

If you would like more information on the recruitment challenges of the future, or would like to discuss your future business strategy and how we can support you, please contact Natasha Volkk on 01275 371 200 or natashavolkk@moonexecsearch.com