In today’s reality, businesses are striving to continue to meet customers’ expectations and meet their bottom lines as well. The pandemic has shown that business will need to evolve and take the opportunities it brings along. Evolving from onsite work to remote (i.e WFH), to hybrid work (some onsite and some days WFH), providing contactless delivery services, the use of drones for logistics, the use of video and conferencing platforms for tons and thousands of meetings, the list is endless. (Look for more current situations that the pandemic has promoted),
Businesses have to continue to re-invent and thrive with the current situation. Both small, medium and large enterprises have had to take up or adopt some new processes and strategies into account to stay afloat in business. Looking at Amazon, the biggest e-commerce platform uses data from each online shopper to track and monitor activities such as buying patterns, pairing products often bought together, items on wishlists, cart abandonment etc. Google on the other hand uses tons of tools such as google analytics, google search, google chrome and its android OS for smartphones to collate data for patterns, trends etc. SMEs can learn a thing or two from larger enterprises to instil the use of data to track and measure their performance and also prepare themselves for the future.
I did handle a project for a company that imports wholesale items and retails them to the big and topmost shopping malls and supermarkets in Nigeria. It was significantly hit with the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Of course, sales dropped due to the absence of shoppers at the supermarkets and retail stores and the company made losses for goods they had bought and shipped into the country. They were major importers of foreign items and brands using locally sourced forex. The CBN also had the time change and set up new guidelines for foreign exchange sourcing. It had major impacts and the company had to suspend a lot of its operations and put some of its staff out of work temporarily. The company is now looking at setting up an e-commerce platform to manage and handle its orders and sales inventory. We had some time in the past use an analytics platform to design some reports on Sales Rep Actuals vs Targets, Inventory Stock Analysis – Comparing the average sales and the months on hands, Price Level Analysis and some other key reports required for their management.
From the Bar chart, we notice that 2020 sales was low compared to the 2021 sales. The line YOY (Year on Year) also allows the management compare the varinaces on a month to month basis as well. The month of April 2020 was the lowest which was the height of the post-pandemic. Quick check shows that the lockdown commenced in lagos on the 26th March, 2020. Thus meaning the low sales in that particular month.
Dominos Pizza a Global franchise managed by Eat-n-Go in Nigeria which happens to be one of the biggest food franchise stores now offers the no contact delivery option on their website and mobile apps when ordering your favourite pizza while still offering the take-out option as well. Such decisions to re-model from the common eat-in option would have been maybe the more desirable option by most Nigerians being that we still love to be in social space. (Read more: https://www.nrn.com/delivery-takeout-solutions/domino-s-launches-custom-contactless-delivery-during-coronavirus-crisis)
With all these current realities, many businesses have to look into their data to spot patterns, spot trends and then make decisions to move their businesses forward. Business can use many tons of platforms and during various points in their busibess to access such data to derive valuable insights.
