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The Direct-To-Consumer Experience Relies On A Great Product Experience

February 17, 2019   SAP
 The Direct To Consumer Experience Relies On A Great Product Experience

In case the stories of closing malls and empty storefronts haven’t caught your attention, shopping has changed. With an ever-growing focus on customer experience, old models upend the established process, bringing consumers and companies together like never before. Think Warby Parker, Casper Mattresses, the list goes on. These are hugely profitable businesses that have cut out the retailer completely.

Clearly, there is money to be made. In fact, former Google executive Tim Armstrong recently launched a new company to bring products and experiences directly to consumers. His new venture, the dtx company, will invest in direct-to-consumer product companies with a goal to “empower consumers and companies to build direct relationships.”

What is direct to consumer?

Direct-to-consumer (or D2C) companies manufacture and deliver their products directly to buyers and totally cut out the middlemen and retailers. This can reduce the total supply chain costs, which can then be passed on to the consumer. D2C companies can still have an omnichannel strategy, from selling online and shipping directly to consumers, to opening pop-up shops in areas that are showing the most demand or interest via social media or actual sales.

D2C success stories from A to Z

The direct-to-consumer model is not new, but it is very lucrative.

According to Diffusion’s 2018 Direct-to-Consumer Purchase Intent Index, one in three U.S. consumers plans to do at least 40% of their shopping from D2C companies in the next five years.

And there are many great success stories for the D2C model:

  • Allbirds built a brand around “non-branding” and focusing on the design of the shoe, with shape, look, and feel being the key elements. In October 2018, the company had an estimated valuation of US$ 1.4 billion.
  • Barkbox realized “man’s best friend is his dog” and caters for them with a monthly subscription for a box of goodies and samples.
  • Bonobos showed who wears the trousers, initially designing a single style of superior pants that focused on a few key elements. Men do not like to shop and the pants usually don’t fit. The company was acquired by Walmart for $ 310 million in 2017.
  • Casper made its own bed by delivering affordable mattresses by limiting choice – and generated $ 100 million.
  • Chubbies literally shorted the target market of “bros” (men from 18-34) who wear shorts and generates $ 23 billion annually.
  • Dollar Shave Club shaved money from its competitors by offering “shaving as a subscription” promoted by memorable viral video campaigns. The company was purchased by Unilever for $ 1 billion in 2017.
  • Harry’s also took a cut into the razor industry and built up a customer base of over 1 million in two years through the design of “one great razor and cheap refill blades.”
  • Hubble set its sights on the $ 12 billion global contact lenses market with a subscription-based offering to an increasingly growing and captive market. In 2018, Colgate Palmolive invested in the company.
  • Warby Parker had a clear vision for the prescription glasses and sunglasses market with try-before-you-buy, either at home or now via augmented reality on your iPhone.
  • Zappos realized you don’t need to use your feet to buy shoes; you can also do it from the comfort of your own home. In 2009, Amazon bought Zappos for a reported $ 900 million.

Don’t be stuck in the middle – evolve or die

At the end of the day, D2C is here to stay. To paraphrase Charles Darwin, “It’s not the strongest of companies that survive, but the ones that are most responsive to change.”

D2C is not only good for the consumers who are demanding a better experience on their own terms.

It is also good for the manufacturer that is looking for an opportunity to build a brand relationship with customers. Having this relationship enables them to collect more customer data and, as a result, have a much better understanding of how to design, manufacture, and deliver exactly what they want.

Drilling down into customer experience

However, selling directly to customers doesn’t necessarily translate to a better customer experience. There is no point delighting the customer with the initial sales and marketing experience if you don’t have the necessary insights, processes, and culture in place to deliver on that promise.

For example, if you are thinking of moving from selling, let’s say a drill, to delivering a service based on hours of usage, you must rethink your business processes from the design of the product or asset, all the way through to how it is used and operated by the customer. You also want to know that it is performing well, as everybody loses if it breaks down. The customer is unhappy (bad customer experience) and you don’t get paid. So, the drill must be designed with IoT sensors that not only track usage but also can sense when the drill is going out of calibration so that you can send a replacement or a service technician to fix it before it breaks down (great customer experience).

When you look at all the examples of successful D2C companies, from A(llbirds) to Z(appos), they all have one thing in common. To keep customers coming back for more, a great customer experience is directly linked to a great product experience. And a smart supply chain helps make that dream come true.

Follow me on Twitter @howellsrichard

Join an interactive session featuring me, Jeff Hojlo, Program Director of Product Innovation Strategies at IDC, and Hans Thalbauer, Senior Vice President of Digital Supply Chain and Industry 4.0 at SAP, to get inspired by how best-in-class companies are reinventing their supply chain. Register here.

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Listening Tricks to Build More Accurate Buyer Personas

February 17, 2019   CRM News and Info
Customer Personas Feature Listening Tricks to Build More Accurate Buyer Personas

Most successful businesses and marketing departments know that defined customer personas are essential for determining the direction and focus of their business development and outreach efforts. Companies thrive, and their success depends on, alleviating customer pain point(s). Knowing what keeps their clients up at night is essential to ensuring a positive customer experience and fueling business growth.

However, what many businesses fail to understand is that customer personas should not be a one-time effort. After all, you can’t expect your customers’ needs and interests to remain stagnant when their environment is constantly changing. In addition, with stats showing that 76% of customers think it’s easy to switch to a brand that meets their needs, it’s in your best interest to constantly stay on top of meeting their expectations. Therefore, to make your marketing and business stand out in a rapidly-evolving market, continuously revisiting and revising your existing customer personas must be a priority.

While interviews, market research, and other resources can offer important insights to help you develop your initial customer profiles, listening to your current customers is the most useful tool for improving your understanding of who they are and what they want. Having an up-to-date perspective of how your existing clients feel about your product or service and their future goals can better equip you to engage them and deliver what they need before your competition steps in.

Are you convinced that it’s time to update your customer personas yet? If so, the following listening tricks will deepen your understanding of your customers and enable you to improve your product and marketing strategy to better address their interests and concerns.

Check In with Your Customer Support Team for Real-Time Feedback

While many of us marketers are more than happy to let the customer support team serve as the front line of defense when it comes to tackling customer grievances, we severely underestimate the wealth of knowledge that exists among within the customer support team and often fail to leverage it. These folks are the first to hear when our product or service is not meeting customers’ expectations, and often get great insights into features customers wish they had access to.

Therefore, tapping into this resource is extremely important if you want to continuously refine your customer personas. Talking to your customer success team from time to time will enable you to not only stay up to date with what your consumers want and need, but it will also help you learn to speak their language and improve your overall messaging for improved engagement.

Make it A Priority to Ask for Feedback

Although you should invest time connecting with other departments across your organization to gather customer feedback and insights, it doesn’t hurt to be proactive and directly reach out to consumers. From time to time, send out a survey asking your customers to rate their experience with your company and provide suggestions for how you can improve. Make sure to also ask your customers to provide details about who they are and their top priorities so you can use this information to further flesh out your buyer profiles.

If you want to get really serious about prioritizing customer feedback, companies like AskNicely offer NPS (Net Promoter Score) software that enables you to easily collect responses and share them with your team. This provides everybody at your organization visibility into who your customers are, what they like and don’t like, and creates accountability across the board for delivering a product or service that puts a smile on their face.

Interview Customers to See What Is Working and What Is Not

Gathering feedback via a survey is a good place to start a conversation with your customers, but that’s not where your interaction should end. Once you’ve sorted through responses, identify customers that you would like to follow up with to have a more in-depth chat regarding their experience with your product or service.

In addition to gaining a better understanding of their experience, take this opportunity to learn about what attracted them to your product in the first place, the most pressing pain points you can help alleviate and how they are looking to grow in the future. Use this information to expand your customer profile and build out a strategy for how you plan to address these concerns and interests in the future.

Tap into Customer Forums

The internet makes it easier than ever for people to air their grievances or rave about a company they truly love, and you can bet that many of your customers will be more than happy to add their two cents if given an opportunity. Although that can be a marketer’s worst nightmare, it also makes for a great tool to measure customer sentiment.

In addition to helping you understand how consumers feel about your product, browsing through topics related to your industry can give you insight into some of the challenges your target customers face on a daily basis, allowing you to better flesh out your customer personas and possibly leading you to your next big idea.

Continuously updating your customer personas enables you to stay ahead when it comes to meeting your customers’ expectations and keeping both retention and demand for your business at an all-time high. With studies demonstrating that 61% of customers claim that a company’s commitment to ensuring their satisfaction furthers their loyalty, making it a priority to know your customers and deliver solutions that match their needs can only strengthen your business.

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Three Ways to Increase Your Restaurant’s Yelp Rating

February 17, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 171115963 Three Ways to Increase Your Restaurant’s Yelp Rating

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

Nearly half of restaurant-goers surveyed said they checked an online review before visiting a business, according to a survey by Restaurant Bistro. Although Google is gaining traction for its reviews, Yelp is still the dominant destination for restaurant reviews, so much so that the restaurant category is most commonly associated with Yelp, according to a recent post on the Yelp blog. In fact, 94 percent of diners are influenced by online reviews, according to a TripAdvisor survey.

But here’s the thing: it’s really hard for a restaurant get a very high rating on Yelp, even harder than it is for businesses in other industries. The average rating for businesses across Yelp is 3.77, with 40 percent of the ratings neither one star nor five stars. For restaurants the average Yelp rating is 3.71 which is consistent across the United States and Canada, according to the Yelp analysis.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Studies consistently show that consumers associate imperfection with authenticity, with even negative reviews serving a somewhat positive role because they establish trust, according to a study from Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center. And there are ways your business can continually try to push those ratings higher and ensure that it’s portrayed at its best to those scrolling through Yelp to make their dining choices. Here is some advice on how to increase your business’ Yelp rating.

1. Understand Yelp’s recommendation engine – and don’t try to game it

Yelp’s recommendation engine is powerful, but can also serve as a source of great frustration for restaurants that see positive reviews filtered out of rankings. About 75 percent of all reviews are recommended, according to Yelp, leaving of course a full one-quarter that are not. This means that while bogus reviews are ditched, sometimes a legitimate one might be caught in that net.

Yelp will “generally” filter out reviews from a person who has written only one review, has no profile photo or posts reviews that are too positive or too negative or are from a location other than where the business is located, according to an article on Vivial. Because quality, reliability and user activity weigh so high in Yelp’s ratings, there are some things you definitely don’t want to do if you’d like to boost your ratings, according to RevLocal. These include avoiding paying or incentivizing people to review your business or asking friends and family to write reviews.

2. Content is king, and brevity, the soul of…it

People pay more attention to what the review says than the star rating itself, according to a blog on Consumer Affairs.

In that same vein, shorter is better. The top 25 percent of mobile reviews by length rated 3.31 on average, while the 25 percent shortest came in at 4.10.

Yelp’s own data demonstrates the benefits of shorter reviews and the words that generally characterize them. A review that fits into a text message and sums up the experience with words like “great,” “best,” “awesome” and “amazing,” is much higher rated than reviews with the words, “ordered,” “came,” “minutes,” “asked” and “wanted,” according to Yelp.

Consider this in developing strategies for getting your customers to leverage Yelp. For instance, if you’re going to include some language on the bottom of a receipt or in a follow-up email asking for a review, consider phrases with a call to action like, “Let others know about your awesome time! Write a few quick words on Yelp!,” or “Was our pizza the best? Help us by spending a second on Yelp!”

What’s more, consider brevity and adjectives in deciding which reviews you want to have recommended of the ones that have been filtered out. According to RevLocal, “if you see a review a real customer has written on your Yelp page, but the review is being filtered, you can add the reviewer as a friend or vote the review useful, funny or cool.” This can help legitimate reviews be recognized by Yelp, according to the blog.

3. Respond to reviews 

Consumers are almost twice as likely to visit the business if the owner responds to a negative review, according to a survey from Review Trackers. How you respond to reviews – negative or positive — makes a big difference in whether consumers view the feedback as authentic and are willing to give your business a try.

First, it’s important to respond fast. Responding within 24 hours increases your chances of having a reviewer upgrade their review to a higher star rating by 33%, according to Yelp. Secondly, use the right channel. A Yelp Business User Account lends the ability to respond to reviews with a Public Comment or Direct Message.

Yelp recommends always starting the review process with a public comment so that, of course, the fact that you value customer service and feedback is apparent to all visitors. But consider following up with a direct message as well, according to Yelp, to gather more information from the consumer about their concerns, whether you believe they are valid or not. It not only lends valuable insight that can reshape how your business approaches something, but engaging a potential adversary could actually help turn them into an impactful ally.

These strategies can help boost your Yelp scores, and ensure consumers continue to spend time on the platform letting the world know just how great, awesome and amazing your restaurant is.

Posted on Thu, February 14, 2019
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A Nation of Immigrants!

February 17, 2019   Humor
 A Nation of Immigrants!
© Jen Sorensen

Not to mention that these same (white) folks have committed more terrorism than any minority group. Law and order starts at home, especially if your home is espousing hatred, racism, and misogyny.

Related

 If you liked this, you might also like these related posts:
  1. A nation of immigrants
  2. How did a country of immigrants start blaming immigrants?
  3. We The Immigrants
  4. The Immigrants Have Won!
  5. What happens when you get rid of illegal immigrants?

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AI examines artery calcium deposits to assess heart disease risk

February 16, 2019   Big Data
 AI examines artery calcium deposits to assess heart disease risk

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. About 610,000 people die of heart attacks and strokes in the U.S. every year, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and worldwide, the number stands at about 17.9 million. CVD isn’t impossible to predict, fortunately — there’s a strong risk factor in coronary artery calcium (CAC) deposits that restrict blood flow. Unfortunately, measuring CAC requires experts who can closely inspect computerized tomography (CT) scans for worsening signs and symptoms.

But there’s hope yet for a more automated approach.

A newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Direct Automatic Coronary Calcium Scoring in Cardiac and Chest CT“) proposes an artificially intelligent (AI) system that can evaluate and score CAC without human supervision. That’s not especially novel — automated CAC tests have been around for a while. However, the coauthors claim that their system is up to hundreds of times faster than state-of-the-art methods.

“Current automatic calcium scoring methods are relatively computationally expensive and only provide scores for one type of CT,” they explain. “[Our] method achieves robust and accurate predictions of calcium scores in real-time.”

The researchers’ AI system comprises two convolutional neural networks, a class of deep neural networks commonly applied to analyzing visual imagery. The first takes as input CT scans and aligns the fields of view, and the second performs direct regression — i.e., linear modeling of the relationship between variables — of the calcium score.

The networks were trained on two datasets: one from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands containing 903 cardiac CT scans, of which 237 scans were used for training; and 1,687 chest CT scans from the National Lung Screening Trial (1,012 of which were used for training). In experiments conducted on an Intel-based PC with an Nvidia Titan X graphics card, the AI algorithms predicted calcium scores in less than 0.3 seconds, with a correlation coefficient (a measure of strength between two variables, in this case between predicted and manual calcium scores) of 0.98 for both cardiac and chest CT scans.

The new paper comes months after researchers at Florida State University and the University of Florida, Gainesville detailed an AI system that could predict one-year mortality in ICU patients who’d experienced a heart attack, and after Corti, an AI system which detects heart attacks during emergency phone calls, started rolling out to London, Paris, Milan, and Munich. It also follows on the heels of Zebra Medical’s successful bid to obtain FDA 510(k) clearance for its coronary calcium scoring algorithm.

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Microsoft a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms for 12 consecutive years

February 16, 2019   Self-Service BI

We’re very grateful to our customers, our community members, and our partners for making Power BI what it is today.

Thank you.

The Power BI Team

Get the 2019 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report* to learn more.

 

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

 

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Integrating MAP With CRM Can Fuel Your Pipeline

February 16, 2019   CRM News and Info

Sales teams are tasked with nurturing leads and driving them to a sale. In order to do this, they need to maintain a clear record of communication with each prospect. This is especially important as the customer journey requires several touchpoints. At the beginning of a customer’s journey, it’s easy for a salesperson to handle introductions via phone. However, as customers get deeper into the journey, strategic face-to-face meetings must take place for success.

Strategic meetings are business-to-business meetings that have the opportunity to generate real business outcomes. In order to close on large deals, strategic meetings are held face to face, and they often include the decision makers at a company. Examples include customer meetings, partner meetings, product demos, briefing center visits, interactions with press, or time with analysts. Events provide a space for these meetings to take place.

Fifty-two percent of respondents to a recent Harvard Business Review study credited event marketing with driving more business value than other marketing channels. However, only 23 percent admitted they were able to calculate an ROI for events.

With the amount of money and clear value in events, it is essential to determine an ROI. This is where a CRM comes into play. Forty-five percent of companies responding to a
recent survey said they used a CRM, but 17 percent of their salespeople found their biggest challenge to be lack of integration with other tools. Integrating your CRM with a Meeting Automation Platform (MAP) allows companies to schedule, manage, and analyze B2B meetings at events.

What Is a Meeting Automation Platform?

A meeting automation platform is software that automates the workflow associated with meetings. It helps with the pre-meeting scheduling process of invitations, agendas and reminders. It also assists the management of the meeting itself through check-in, monitoring of available and needed resources, and tracking its progress. Finally, it allows post-meeting analysis to take place. Surveys can be sent to attendees, metrics can be analyzed, records can be updated, and estimated revenue can be tracked. A meeting automation platform works best with integrations to an ecosystem of software, like a CRM.

The integration of a MAP and CRM is obviously most beneficial at an event where hundreds to thousands of meetings are taking place. Following are my thoughts on the benefits of integrating a MAP with your CRM, and how it ultimately can fuel your pipeline at events.

The Benefits of CRM Integration

The primary benefit of integrating a MAP with your CRM is the ability to schedule meetings on the go. Strategic meetings are crucial to closing any deal, so you do not want to miss out on the chance to schedule one.

This integration allows sales teams to schedule meetings directly from their CRM on the account, opportunity or leads pages.

Pre-schedule Meetings

Typically a sales team has a target number of meetings to schedule at an event in order to close the deals they need. The problem at events is a large majority of the audience in attendance does not align with the target audience of your company. This is why it is helpful for the sales team to pre-schedule meetings at an event.

More strategic meetings scheduled increases the likelihood of opportunities turning into sales. A MAP and CRM integration is a great way to automate the management of the pre-scheduling process without ever leaving the CRM.

Tracking Meetings

Integrations with CRMs, particularly Salesforce, allow meetings to be recorded in the event campaign dashboard. This is beneficial for sellers, so they can include all of the data from the mentioned pages into the meeting request process. All the necessary information is captured both internally and externally.

As a result, when any internal invites go out, the mapped opportunity/customer info is in the body of the invite and acts as a briefing report. External attendees can be added automatically as members under the respective campaigns.

Tracking external attendees who participated in meetings under a campaign helps sellers follow up with buyers to turn opportunities into closed deals. After an event, the results of all meetings can be synced up within the CRM.

Eliminate Email and Calendar Redundancies

Meetings are crucial to the sales process, yet most CRMs do not aid in meeting management on their own. Account representatives constantly face the challenge of securing and confirming meetings. On average, the confirmation process can require up to 14 emails back and forth. This is a lot of wasted time and effort going back and forth between emails, calendars and spreadsheets.

When a MAP is integrated into the CRM it automates the process for the sales team. An account representative can request a meeting without leaving the CRM, and invites will be sent automatically.

Each meeting will have a detailed agenda to ensure meeting attendees are well prepared. If the internal attendees utilize a mobile app for their CRM, they can be updated on changes in the agenda through push notifications. This automation can be a huge time saver as the sales team prepares for an upcoming event.

Access Relevant Data

Obtaining the right data can help sales teams better serve their customers. All the necessary information for the meeting is stored and accessed in the CRM.

Sellers also can gain relevant and actionable insights into where each customer is in the sales pipeline. These insights can be pushed through reports and dashboards to help sellers secure deals and marketers showcase ROI.

Prepare for Meetings

As you access relevant data, you can prepare better for each meeting. At events, you are on the go and there are numerous meetings that have different internal attendees and different customers. This creates a lot of information to track.

CRMs provide insight into who the customer is and what is important to them as well as where they are at in the process of getting a deal finalized. This allows the sales team to make the best use of the time in front of the customer.

Determine Event Value

By combining your CRM with a MAP, marketers can assign a dollar amount to each meeting that takes place. This dollar amount is tracked throughout the sales process until a deal is completed, allowing teams to determine the revenue impacted not only by each meeting but also by the event as a whole.

At each event, you can look at various metrics to determine value. For example, the average deal size helps the team keep a tab on which opportunities are more important to invest time in.

Another key metric is the time spent in meetings. An average B2B meeting could last anywhere from a half an hour to multiple hours. Time is valuable to both parties, especially at an event. Tracking the average time of each meeting, combined with the people in attendance, can help you see if you are making the best use of your time in meetings.

Additionally, tracking provides insight into the use of resources. At any given event you are investing money into meeting rooms. You might find you are wasting money by renting rooms that are not being used. The MAP will track room usage and show if this an area to cut costs for next year.

At the end of the day, integrating your CRM with a MAP further facilitates sales and marketing collaboration and reduces the time it takes to close a deal. There are numerous benefits to this integration. Whether it is scheduling meetings directly from your CRM, a seamless data transfer from the MAP to the CRM, or measuring the impacted revenue.

Automating the workflow associated with meetings can give sales and marketing teams valuable time to focus on other efforts, such as developing personalized content for the sales process. When less time is wasted for your team and all attendees are provided with the necessary information, more quality strategic meetings can occur.
end enn Integrating MAP With CRM Can Fuel Your Pipeline


Ravi%20Chalaka Integrating MAP With CRM Can Fuel Your Pipeline
Ravi Chalaka is CMO at
Jifflenow. Chalaka is a marketing and business development expert who creates and executes business strategies, generating demand and raising brand/product awareness in competitive markets. As VP of marketing at both large and small technology companies, Chalaka has built strong teams and brands, and enabled faster revenue growth for a wide range of solutions based on big data, SaaS, AI and IoT software, HCI, SAN and NAS. Ravi has MBA degrees in marketing and finance and is an expert industry spokesperson and presenter.

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6 Ways Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing Manufacturing in 2019

February 16, 2019   BI News and Info
assembly line 1200 6 Ways Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing Manufacturing in 2019

From the first harnessing of economies of scale to the introduction of the assembly line, the search for new efficiencies has always been at the heart of manufacturing. Today, the greatest new gains come from the innovative combination of hardware and software. In particular, robotics has revolutionized manufacturing, allowing for greater output from fewer workers.

But while robotics has been making an impact for decades now, machine learning is just beginning to live up to its full potential. A 2017 survey by PWC found that only around half of all companies were already using it. Yet when implemented, machine learning can have a massive impact on companies’ bottom lines.

Ultimately, the biggest shift has been from a world where the business impact of machine learning has been largely theoretical to one where it is now quite real. The proven impact of machine learning models has pushed more investment toward their development. Still there are plenty more gains to be realized. To better understand the potential (and how you can harness it for your business), here are 6 ways machine learning is revolutionizing manufacturing.

1. Machine Learning is Revamping Quality Control

You’ve likely seen plenty of clips showing workers sifting through products whizzing by on an assembly line, looking for flaws. This is overwhelming and exhausting work, and you probably wonder how anyone can maintain the focus necessary to find small flaws for hours at a time. In a real world example, quality control was crippling GM throughout the 1970s. This led them to take the Toyota Manufacturing Technique and implement it in many of their factories.

Even when advanced manufacturing techniques are implemented, using humans to spot defects and errors is inherently limiting. Our senses and attention span simply have natural limits far below what machine sensors can offer. What does that difference add up to?

Forbes found that machine learning increased defect detection rates by up to 90%.

Quality control is often done by humans because it’s usually visual. If weight or shape is the main quality factor, it’s far easier for a machine task. Scanning for misaligned labels, off-colors,  shine levels, and even cracks is fairly simple for a human but very difficult for a machine. Machine learning, however, allows algorithms to visually inspect products and identify flaws more quickly.

A case study involving steel manufacturing uncovered the impact that machine learning might have when defects are identified earlier in the process, leading to less waste. Factories are also able to efficiently identify possible causes of these defects. Besides the products themselves, machine learning can even improve the machines that make the products.

2. Machine Learning can Minimize Equipment Failures

Determining when to conduct maintenance on equipment is an exceptionally difficult task with huge stakes. Each time a machine is taken out for maintenance, it’s not doing its job and may even require factory downtime until it is repaired. Frequent fixes mean losses, and infrequent maintenance can lead to even more costly breakdowns. Global costs of equipment downtime adds up to $ 647 billion dollars annually. Looked at another way: The average international cost of said downtime is $ 5,600 per minute.

With those costs in mind, it’s no surprise that preventing even a single unplanned outage can pay for the cost of implementing machine learning. How does machine learning minimize these issues, exactly?

Machine learning algorithms are excellent at balancing multiple sources of data to predict and determine optimal repair time. This can be done simply by identifying errors and defects as they occur so they are addressed immediately – not once a human has discovered them at a later time. In addition, machine learning algorithms utilize historical data to identify patterns of equipment failure, helping them determine when regular maintenance should occur.

Data can also be taken automatically from inside the equipment, eliminating the need for a manual check. Increased speed and efficiency – plus decreased manpower costs – translate into substantial ROI for most firms, but the biggest gains come from a change in how maintenance is conducted.

3. Predictive Maintenance

This data boils down to a shift from reactive to proactive repair work. Generally, maintenance is conducted once a problem occurs, due to the high cost of taking equipment offline to have it manually checked for potential problems. When this occurs, managers constantly face an impossible choice: Take equipment offline and incur a loss now, or risk even greater losses down the line.

The role of machine learning is to identify the ideal moment to make that choice, and remove the costly and stressful guesswork. By using machine learning to predict when equipment breakdowns are likely to occur, your company can be far more proactive and ensure they are serviced before that happens. This results in fewer errors, less downtime, and lower human-capital costs because managers and other workers need to be less involved.

What do those benefits add up to? A recent study by Deloitte found that poor maintenance can decrease production by 5-20%. It’s clear that putting machine learning at the core of equipment care is essential to avoid costly inefficiencies.

The Advantages of Machine Learning Go Beyond the Factory

Even after machine learning has helped with quality control and machine maintenance, the resulting product still has a long way to go. For storing and shipping, machine learning has a role to play in identifying inefficiencies, and here’s how:

4. Supply Chain Optimization

Whether you’re looking at replacement parts for your factory equipment – or the products that equipment produces – reliable supply chains are essential for any manufacturing business. As the global economy becomes more complex, so does the challenge of optimizing these supply chains.

A single shift in weather, damaged ships, or change in fuel prices can reverberate throughout your supply chains, greatly impacting your business. Remember that the average time of equipment that’s down is $ 5,600 per minute. This cost applies just as much if you’re waiting for raw materials as if the equipment is broken.

Machine learning takes all of these complex factors into account and optimizes each element of your supply chain in response. This could mean calculating how much extra time to give a shipment (to account for the probability of a delay and/or its financial impact), or deciding where to ship a product from, based on possible weather patterns or other potential hurdles.

Put simply, a machine learning algorithm can take dozens – or even hundreds – of factors into consideration before making the best possible choice for your business.

The importance of minimizing these delays comes down to inventory and cash flow. If, for example, you can increase the efficiency of your supply chain by 10%, that means you can produce 10% more product while decreasing the level of unpredictability in the production process. Efficient and reliable production are essential for a successful manufacturing business, and machine learning makes both accessible in a way it never has been before.

5. Inventory Optimization

Closely connected with supply chain optimization, machine learning can have a similar impact on optimizing inventory. Holding costs (the cost of storing inventory) are massive, usually hovering around 20-30% of the cost of a product. Even a modest reduction of 10% in holding costs can reduce your per-unit costs by 2-3%. Holding unsold or undelivered products means paying for storage space. This may not sound like a major problem, but its effect on cash flow is immense.

Here, the role of machine learning is to calculate when it makes economic sense to hold on to or sell inventory, or even increase/reduce production of inventory. This is done by monitoring the supply chain elements mentioned above, as well as market prices, holding costs, and production capacity.

Carefully considering and balancing all of these elements has traditionally been a human’s job. With the ever-increasing amount of data reflected in each of these areas, however, humans are a poor choice for the task.

Therefore, the role of machine learning is an obvious one. By analyzing thousands or even millions of bits of information to make decisions, these algorithms go far beyond anything a human analyst is capable of. No surprise then that the results on overall efficiency can be substantial.

Factory-Wide Efficiency Gains from Machine Learning

There are also applications for machine learning that fall further outside of the areas already mentioned. Factories have more inputs than raw materials for production or information for analysis: Factories also run on commodities like electricity.

6. Using Machine Learning for Electricity Consumption

Obviously, one of the greatest inputs for any factory is electricity. While most factories operate 24 hours a day for optimal efficiency, it’s possible to schedule more energy-intensive activities for different times. The idea is to ensure those activities occur when power is cheapest. Depending on its source, this could be during the day (if solar power is prominent) or during the night (when demand is generally lower).

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. You obviously need to take a myriad of other factors into consideration. Once again, this is where machine learning’s ability to process large amounts of data comes into play. By considering energy prices alongside labor costs, equipment maintenance, and minimizing inventory, these algorithms can schedule the perfect time to perform energy-intensive activities for maximum cost savings.

Working backwards, this information can also allow you to intelligently invest in electrical infrastructure, whether that’s energy storage or solar power. Essentially, machine learning algorithms can allow you to precisely quantify the value of your factory’s electricity at any particular moment.

You can more precisely determine where such investments make sense, use your resources more strategically, and get more out of your factories.

Bringing Greater Efficiency to Every Area of Manufacturing

It’s not surprising that machine learning continues to impact manufacturing, but it might be more shocking that does so at nearly every stage. Machine learning can offer substantial cost savings in many areas, from buying raw materials to maintaining equipment. The flexibility of this technology explains its rise in popularity as it has become far more user friendly and less reliant on hiring teams of data scientists.

What’s stopping you from using machine learning today? RapidMiner makes data science more accessible than ever. Year after year, more case studies and research reports get published, providing concrete evidence for its benefits. The challenge is simply understanding how to best apply it to your business. We have lots of experience working with manufacturing organizations, but each company offers its own unique set of complexities and challenges so contact us about your use case and get started today.

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Friday Dance Party!

February 16, 2019   Humor

Posted by Krisgo

 Friday Dance Party!

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About Krisgo

I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon icon smile Friday Dance Party!


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Manage your KPIs with Dynamics 365 Goals

February 16, 2019   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Goal management in Dynamics 365 is a tool which provides the ability to manage KPIs in just a few clicks. You can use goals to compare targets and actuals for a defined period. And given the fact that Goals is an out of the box feature with Dynamics 365, you can set them up in no time at all. Additionally, since Goals are native to the system, they work seamlessly with workflows, business rules and other various Dynamics 365 functions.

Goals Pic 1 Manage your KPIs with Dynamics 365 Goals

To help you understand how goals work, consider the following scenario:

Your company sells drywall, you, as the sales manager, want to set a revenue target for the overall sales team and then targets for each individual sales team rep who will contribute to the sales team target. With the given targets you want the ability to monitor progress throughout the fiscal period.

To get the results you desire you will need to utilize a couple of entities in Dynamics 365 and create a handful of records:

1. Goal Metric: this allows you to set the detailed measurement (amount or count) for the defined goals. You can create multiple goal metric records to measure different elements, revenue and number of panels sold for example.

Goals Pic 2 Manage your KPIs with Dynamics 365 Goals

2. Rollup Fields: the goal metric includes a section where you identify the rollup fields which will be used to track against the metric. You will define rollup fields which will be used to measure both the in progress and actual values.

Goals Pic 3 Manage your KPIs with Dynamics 365 Goals

3. Goal: the entity where you will define who is responsible for the goal, the metric being measured and the target. In the scenario where you are setting an overall sales team goal and then individual goals, you will create multiple goal records (1 for the overall cumulative goal, and then 1 for each sales team member).

Goals Pic 4 Manage your KPIs with Dynamics 365 Goals

All sales records identified will be rolled up against each sales agent’s goal, which is the child goals. Then the child goals will be rolled up to the parent goal, which is the overall sales team goal. You can then set up a dashboard with data components which display goal metrics, allowing you to sit back and monitor results as they start rolling in.

If you need assistance or have any questions while setting up goals, please reach out to our support team at [email protected]. We are always happy to help you increase the productivity of your Dynamics 365 environment!

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