Big Data for SMBs: It’s Your Present and Future

Data analytics is the strongest force currently shaping your company’s future. Whether you’re in manufacturing, wholesale/retail, home building, residential contracting, or any of the verticals ECI Software Solutions serves, the power to leverage data to grow your business and become a market leader is now within your budget. The availability of computing power has huge consequences for your business and for all of your competitors.

Data gives you a headstart over the competition and an unfair advantage

Data analytics provides small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with incredibly detailed insights into all aspects of operations including accounting, finance, marketing, sales, customer relationship management, logistics, and supply chain. With a true picture of your entire business, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution can help you leverage the power of data to:

• Gain business insights and monitoring capabilities needed to analyze what is working well and what isn’t, and adjust to issues as they arise.
• Identify and forecast industry and economic trends impacting the business.
• Capture customer data to identify buying patterns and behaviors, and eventually map out sales cycles and customer journeys.
• Improve service, quickly answering customer, client, vendor, and partner inquiries.
• Ideally calibrate inventory levels to meet customer demand while still maximizing available cash for investments.
• Identify which marketing channels to focus on in order to save on marketing spend while increasing revenue.

Use data to see your business like you never have before

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Data provides the tools for SMB leaders to see their businesses as they never have before, in the ways that larger organizations have been able to do for years. Industry-specific ERP provide software with economies of scale so that smaller businesses are no longer flying blind relative to the larger competitors that once ate their lunches.

SMB leaders in all industries are now leveraging ERP solutions to observe, investigate, model, contextualize, and execute on new business models. ERP and data deliver the power to blend human expertise and experience (and the instinct and intuitions they provide) with purely factual information. When compiled over time, that information provides increasingly valuable insights.

According to a recent Onepath survey, ERP systems are used for decisions on how to grow the business (66%), budgets (59%) and staffing (40%). The survey reveals that as of 2020, 60% of SMBs are using a web- or cloud-based data analytics system. These business’s leaders are no longer relying on gut instinct and guesswork to guide their short- and long-term decision-making. Guesswork is a thing of the past. Data-driven SMBs are making better decisions now, and their decisions will only get better over time.

At 60% market penetration, it’s likely that a majority of your competitors are already powered by data and making smarter decisions by the day. One thing is certain; the industries we serve are at a tipping point. Is your business gaining the early mover’s advantage?