It's Not The Size of the Data, It's How You Use It

Take the Procter & Gamble Case study on Data Visualization, for example. Here the author offers a P & G Heat Map that is used to manage and develop strategic product plans across a wide range of well-known brands – Bounty paper towels, Braun electronics, Iams pet foods, Pampers, Tide, Vicks, etc – whose markets emphasize varying usage and adoption trends.  If a product manager were to study the market performance of each of these separate brands, he would miss the whole picture, and that’s where the author’s explanation and executive quotes are so useful. 

For example, the Heat Map shown in 11-8 presents how each of these products ranks in market share for each of their respective country markets.  To see the full color display, click on the author’s website at notthesizeofthedata.com.  The relative size of each box indicates the importance of growing that particular market share to overall company performance.  So the innovation here is that managers can instantly ascertain how a particular product contributes to company performance, pick out the winners and laggards, and decide where to put growth resources to capture even more market.  The idea of comparing product performance with potential performance is facilitated by this simple but colorful dashboard visual. 

The reader will find 16 other case studies that back up the smart application of analytics and dashboards, including:

·        “the Right Chair”, a story about Inofec BV, a medium-sized European office furniture supplier that optimized it’s business during the recession, and learned how to dig deep in customer data to provide best, and most innovative service on the block;

·       An American car company learns how to use dashboards and quick-change visuals to step out of the “working hard and smarter” mindset tied to older vehicle models and lower ad budgets, with the result a new optimization model that allowed managers to try out different scenarios

·       Dashboards contrasting Charlotte and Atlanta city performance

Unisys, EB Games, a $1.4B US-based computer and video games retailer;  a leading fashion retailer that struggled with changing its legacy IT system; an IT major that restructured its KPI generation activity, generated, then organized over 150 metrics; First Tennessee Bank, etc. 

For supply management and manufacturing professionals, these stories and illustrations are encouraging because they help users select key KPI, develop a strategy to integrate social media and web data with strategic plans, and design the ultimate and most user-friendly dashboard layout.  The author’s implementation recommendations will help reader move from the vision and planning required for this type of information culture change,  to identifying and developing the right analytical skills to well use all the data we now have available. 

         Mill Girl Verdict:  Loved the book, not so much the title, loved the case studies, a step-by-step user-friendly guided approach to Big Data.  A Winner!