4 Ways to Ensure Quality Data and Analytics in Electronic Components Distribution

How much does a lack of data visibility and quality cost you as an electronic component manufacturer? You can’t compute quality into dollars and cents. You can determine what quality data earns your company through better channel management and relationships, transparent pricing, incentive management, gaining a competitive advantage and revenue growth instead of leakage. 

What do we mean by quality data and visibility? 

Your mounds of data need to work hard for you — really hard. Each team in your organization must have the ability to reveal the unknown, using data to:

• Discover and explore multiple data sources
• Assess and ask questions about your data
• Recommend quickly and access insights as needed
• Optimize decisions by utilizing historical data

To do this, your data must be clean and free from silos so that the data is visible. Every successful electronic component manufacturer knows that clear visibility into data and analytics isn’t possible until your basic processes, such as pricing and incentive management, run efficiently, transparently and accurately. An ECM that has automated transactional processes and integrates data science and analytics tools becomes more transparent from start to finish. As you become more efficient using data modeling, opportunities will arise, such as developing better strategies.

With transactional processes in place, you can develop 4 fundamental ways to harness the power of data science and utilize analytics that will directly affect the bottom line.

1. Building resiliency into your supply chain

In a world of high-velocity change, offense wins. Predictive analytics allows you to optimize raw materials purchasing and deliveries based on your future demands. Your company has experienced the importance of remaining forward-thinking regarding your supply chain strategies. Your decision on whether to add additional resiliency into your supply base might mean you are looking at higher costs for certain materials.

For your supply chain, that includes the power to take full advantage of new analytics that give you proactive insight into the effectiveness of your supply predictions and how they affect pricing and revenue management for ongoing optimization. Integrating analysis and predictive modeling into the supply chain can help improve visibility throughout your customer base and help you to optimize your costs. This visibility is a priceless endeavor for growth and sustainability in channel relationships. Simulations and modeling will help guide you in tweaking your supply chain predictive modeling so you can reach your business goals and sustain your relationships.

2. Forecast and respond positively to changes…no crystal ball needed

There are 2 types of change ECMs face: cyclical and market conditions. While cyclical fluctuations allow for more accurate predictions, market conditions require you to use real-time, accurate data to make predictions. The speed of innovation and market changes have increased the importance and need to predict change. Visibility into your data is an essential tool for predictive analytics. When you have 360 visibility into clean and accurate data, you can predict changes in customer initiatives and meet their demands — gaining a competitive advantage and revenue growth.

To accomplish this and maximize revenue opportunities requires:

• Demand Management
  Predicting optimistic change timelines to allocate inventory by price and preparedness to pay
• Resource Management
  Balancing resources against the demand to allocate products and processes to maximize value

3. Expand your customer base

Expanding your customer base and expanding into new markets and product offerings happen at the same speed as innovation when you can rely on clean data and accurate predictions. These are vital to growth strategies. Analytics are necessary for almost everything you do to grow your business. It’s essential to have reliable information to forecast pricing, ship & debit and incentives. Let’s not discount the importance of understanding the probability of winning new customers at the right price. Visibility into purchasing patterns for certain products and customer targets will help you target the right customer base.

4. Measure your initiatives with accuracy…you can see clearly now

The most important steps to achieving visibility into your data include clearly understanding your history and discerning what is happening now. Only then will you be able to capture and manage real-time data to predict the future and recommend what you can do moving forward. Measuring with accuracy happens when you have a clean data source, can correlate the data for predictive analytics and reference meaningful data for different perspectives and strategies.

You are tasked to make countless decisions. There is power in understanding what’s hiding in your data and harnessing better ways to analyze it proficiently.

Are you ready to move to a predictive mode? With pricing and incentives growing more complex, there’s no time like the present to prepare. It’s worth repeating…harnessing the power only happens when you have your transactional processes in place following a smart Crawl, Walk, Run strategy. Only then will you be ready to move across multi-disciplinary processes and fully connect your data to insights.