Last month we shared why you should ditch your sales report and start using business intelligence. In today’s world, with robust and easy to use tools, why are we making our jobs more difficult than they need to be? If there is a better tool on the market to allow you to work more efficiently and profitably, wouldn’t you take advantage of it?

The top-performing bakeries in our industry utilize business intelligence (BI) tools to gain a competitive advantage. BI tools capture and report detailed information that help you to boost productivity and profitability through solid business decisions. Here are a few ways you can find dough (pun intended) by implementing business intelligence in your bakery.

Sales

A successful bakery understands the ins and outs of their sales. From invoices to the sales data, our BI dashboard is tailored for actionable data. A well designed BI dashboard equips your team with data trends that are easy to analyze because you can drill down and get as detailed as you want.

One way BI tools can help your bakery business sales staff is to better predict consumer demand. By analyzing transaction details and predictive sales your team can understand and optimize its production. And, BI can help you to dig even deeper and include profit margins in your sales analysis. Understanding your business at this level will help you to optimize your profits based on consumer demands by outlet and retailer.

Marketing

Social media is a priceless BI tool for understanding your bakery’s audience and building your business community. Are you tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your social media? Important social media KPIs include your fan and follower interactions, shareability of content, engagement rate, and growth of your fan and follower base.

Before you can harness the power of social analytics, you need to determine the goal of your bakery’s efforts. Identifying customer personas that highlight common traits and demographics will help you to build correlations between your social efforts and bakery trends. This type of business intelligence is priceless for bakery businesses.

Social media brings your audience together in ways like never before. Now, when you post on your platforms, you can develop meaningful conversations around topics important to your business. These conversations help you to build your digital community, nurture leads, and increase sales opportunities.

Looking at these interactions and conversations you can begin to develop patterns. This type of business intelligence was much more difficult before digital media when a company relied on the broad metrics of television and print media.

Production

Another set of KPI’s that you need to know are your bakery’s production yields. Knowing how you are performing along your production line is imperative. BI allows your production managers to update inventory to keep up with demand for certain products.

Combined with enterprise resource planning tools, like HarvestERP, BI tools give you a better understanding of where you have inefficiencies, such as for lower-than-normal yields. This is great information to determine if your team needs training in key production areas or if you need to conduct maintenance work or even replace certain machinery.

In addition, BI tools give you data visualization that you never had with basic sales reports and spreadsheets. The power of our BI solution is in its ability to present complex, raw data in a simple but powerful way. We offer visually impactful reporting that can be understood by all departments within your company. This way your team has the data, both historical and forecasted, to better manage production and optimize resources in real time.

Shipping

Many businesses, perhaps even yours, suffers from siloed data. This can be a huge obstacle for accessing daily transactions and shipping logistics. Consistent and actionable, HarvestBI provides a single source of data for your entire organization, freeing data that’s been locked away in siloed systems throughout your business. Our integration engine allows you to access data regardless of the source. This means that your team has real-time, detailed shipping data analytics at the swipe of a finger.

Available in a single, easy to use dashboard, HarvestBI offers you the power to access your shipping data and KPIs whether on a tablet or a phone, which gives you the freedom to analyze from anywhere. No longer do you have to suffer from fragmented information from disparate sources. BI is your key to unlocking the data you need to optimize your shipping, tracking, and invoicing insights.

The amount of time and effort you have to put into running your perishable foods business is extraordinary. Are you ready to find dough through business intelligence? Then give us a call today to find out how we can help your business.

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