Today, it’s essen­tial to have the right data to dri­ve your busi­ness for­ward. Yet it’s a big chal­lenge to main­tain data that’s struc­tured in a clean, orga­nized man­ner and set­ting it up so it can be deliv­ered at a moment’s notice to those who need it.

Kar­ma Bevel­himer, vice pres­i­dent of retail oper­a­tions for Nation­al Vision, was tasked with doing just that for one of the largest and fastest-grow­ing opti­cal retail­ers in the Unit­ed States. Nation­al Vision has five main dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels and oper­ates more than 1,000 retail brick-and-mor­tar loca­tions. To cre­ate a data enter­prise that worked for the orga­ni­za­tion, Bevel­himer knew she need­ed to first get com­pa­ny-wide buy-in and par­tic­i­pa­tion in iden­ti­fy­ing the com­mon core mea­sures for Nation­al Vision. These are the met­rics that the com­pa­ny has agreed to use so that all busi­ness units are defin­ing and mea­sur­ing suc­cess in the same way.

Get Your C‑Suite on Board

Accord­ing to a sur­vey con­duct­ed by For­rester Con­sult­ing, only 51 per­cent of data pro­fes­sion­als believe their C‑suite exec­u­tives ful­ly sup­port their organization’s data and ana­lyt­ics strategy. 

Bevel­himer began the buy-in process at Nation­al Vision by hold­ing key meet­ings with every depart­ment head, as well as every key report­ing and ana­lyt­i­cal direc­tor. The idea was to pre­plan the tem­plate for the organization’s data — a wish list of sorts. She asked them, ​“What are you using today? What are you miss­ing? What is it you wish you had?”

Demon­strate What Data Can Do

When she first came on board 16 years ago, the orga­ni­za­tion was run­ning reports out of an IBM AS/400 sys­tem. These were lim­it­ed to canned reports that didn’t pro­vide much infor­ma­tion. Bevel­himer couldn’t even answer a ques­tion as sim­ple as, ​“What have sales been like on Tues­days for the last sev­en years?”

Orga­nized, easy-to-find data will pre­pare your busi­ness to answer those types of ques­tions. It can also inform the C‑suite about your cus­tomers, help you stream­line exist­ing oper­a­tions, and man­age risk and com­pli­ance. To get buy-in from your lead­ers, Bevel­himer explained that you need to start by show­ing them that data can do these things and more.

Find Com­mon Ground

The first step of under­stand­ing how to use your data is to iden­ti­fy what you want to gain from it. Both peo­ple and tech­nol­o­gy play a crit­i­cal role in the process of defin­ing the com­mon core mea­sures for your organization.

“We approached this process demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly,” Bevel­himer said. Her team held a meet­ing with com­pa­ny lead­ers to explain the project’s objec­tive and ask every­one to iden­ti­fy their key wants. ​“After they all took the time to think about it, we had this mas­sive list. Some stuff was unre­al­is­tic, and some stuff was already available.”

Bevel­himer and her team pared the list down to come to a con­sen­sus. ​“If mer­chan­dis­ing wants units of some­thing and mar­ket­ing wants units of some­thing, but they’re both think­ing of these in a dif­fer­ent way,” she asked, ​“is there a com­mon­al­i­ty that every­one can agree on?” Her team set out to find those answers.

Choose the Met­rics That Matter

At the end of the exer­cise, Bevelhimer’s team was able to form com­mon def­i­n­i­tions. In some cas­es, this was eas­i­er said than done. ​“There were a lot of things that we said no to,” Bevel­himer not­ed. ​“If it isn’t a com­mon met­ric and if it isn’t dri­ving your busi­ness — every day, every week — then it shouldn’t be included.”

She let every­one know that they’d still be able to get to the data they want­ed through oth­er means. This exer­cise was sim­ply to bring the imme­di­a­cy of how they were man­ag­ing the busi­ness to the atten­tion of the whole com­pa­ny through key metrics.

Iden­ti­fy Your Stew­ards Early

No mat­ter how well-pre­pared or how well-defined the process, there’s a point where it will no longer be demo­c­ra­t­ic, espe­cial­ly in a large enter­prise. ​“This is when hav­ing a stew­ard becomes very help­ful,” Bevel­himer said. ​“You need some­one to be able to say, ​‘We’ve lis­tened to all of you, but these sug­ges­tions are not prac­ti­cal for this purpose.’”

Find­ing con­sen­sus is a pain point for many orga­ni­za­tions. But if you can iden­ti­fy the key play­ers that rep­re­sent the com­mon core mea­sures and who are in a posi­tion of author­i­ty, then it’s not as painful to find that consensus.

Your stew­ards will also need to know how to inter­act with the IT depart­ment. ​“Those work­ing in the IT depart­ment are like the mechan­ics of an orga­ni­za­tion,” Bevel­himer said. ​“They don’t real­ly dri­ve the car every day and see that some­thing might be going wrong. The data stew­ard, on the oth­er hand, is the dri­ver. That per­son should not only have good busi­ness acu­men but should also be able to relay what they know based on their exper­tise to the IT department.”

Keep Devel­op­ing Your Data

After about 18 months of meet­ings, imple­men­ta­tion, and onboard­ing, Nation­al Vision iden­ti­fied 100 key dimen­sions of the busi­ness to mea­sure. ​“We have oth­er vari­ables like all the facts about a date, or about a store,” Bevel­himer said. ​“But the key met­rics revolve around 100 com­mon core measures.”

All 100 mea­sures under­go an annu­al review by each depart­ment to iden­ti­fy whether any­thing needs to change. ​“We have an annu­al strat­e­gy and plan­ning meet­ing for the upcom­ing year to iden­ti­fy goals. We also eval­u­ate our met­rics on an as-need­ed basis if there is a new prod­uct launch or promotion.”

Bevel­himer encour­ages every­one receiv­ing the reports to keep up with their wish lists. ​“We keep those in mind and have the IT teams build new mea­sures when they have time.” She makes it a point to remind every­one in the orga­ni­za­tion that the IT team is good at IT stuff, but they’re not busi­ness users. ​“Busi­ness users know what they want, but they don’t know how to ask for it,” she added. ​“Try­ing to get those two togeth­er is the mag­ic hat trick. For our orga­ni­za­tion, that’s why my depart­ment exists. We are that liai­son and translator.”

Work Your Data so It Can Work for You

You’ve done the hard part of iden­ti­fy­ing stew­ards and get­ting buy-in. You’ve start­ed clean­ing and orga­niz­ing your data so you can decide how to best use it. You’ve put a process in place to audit these mea­sures and refine them. So, what’s next? You need to teach every­one how to use it, and then let it work for you.

“We have a few pow­er users in the orga­ni­za­tion,” Bevel­himer said. ​“We’ve got them writ­ing their own reports now. We have it set up so it’s a self-serve process.” Her team sends out the same report to the entire field orga­ni­za­tion, but the recip­i­ents have the option to take the same con­tent and rerun it in a dif­fer­ent report ver­sion. ​“We train them to be able to write for­mu­las, drag, drop, sort, or fil­ter. For a dis­trict man­ag­er who oper­ates between 12 and 20 loca­tions, to be able to get that kind of infor­ma­tion with­out going to an IT guru is very valuable.”

Even still, it can be a strug­gle to edu­cate new and exist­ing employ­ees about how these reports work and how they can get the full ben­e­fits from them.

Set Your­self Up for Self-Serve Success

Nation­al Vision is look­ing into SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud as well as SAP Fiori for next steps. ​“When I saw the tile struc­ture of SAP Fiori, I thought what if I could get each brand its own page with those tiles? It’s still the same com­mon­ly used reports, but that visu­al I think would get them over the, ​‘I’m afraid to push the wrong but­ton’ type of response,” Bevel­himer said. 

For the C‑suite, Bevel­himer said her team pro­vides dash­board like reports with infor­ma­tion com­piled into one to three pages. They are designed so the lead­ers can quick­ly get a high-lev­el view of the business.

Let the Data Lead the Story

“These changes have been very ben­e­fi­cial,” she added. ​“It’s helped all our stores. Whether we want them to focus on some­thing that needs cor­rect­ing or if we want to cel­e­brate the things they are doing right, we can eas­i­ly show this.”

At the end of this process, Nation­al Vision was able to define key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors and mea­sures, get con­sis­tent data through­out the entire orga­ni­za­tion, and gain con­fi­dence in its data qual­i­ty. Now Bevel­himer is look­ing for­ward to mak­ing their sys­tem even faster and eas­i­er for every­one involved.

If you’re look­ing to learn how your peers are doing more with busi­ness intel­li­gence and ana­lyt­ics, you should join us at the BI+Analytics Con­fer­ence in Atlanta, Geor­gia, March 9 – 11. Ear­ly-bird reg­is­tra­tion is avail­able through Jan. 31, and ASUG mem­bers receive $200 off registration.