6 ways AI-driven BI can beat your financial and operational Q4 blues
Lots of businesses are heading into Q4 right now – and that brings pressures that AI-driven business analytics can help with.
Some of these pressures might include:
- Meeting revenue targets
- Improving inventory management
- Renewing customer contracts
- Budgeting and planning
- Cash flow and collections.
Our Directors have lived those pressures. Our clients too. That’s why for the last 10 years we’ve been developing and refining our leading AI-driven business analytics platform, QEA (pronounced ‘key’).
Our clients have seen that pressure relieved. Their results include:
- A 25% increase in after sales revenue
- A £9m per month increase in working capital
- Improved visibility over procurement processes
- A bespoke solution that transformed sales strategy
- Excess inventory stock reduced by 20%
Let’s find out how QEA helped them do this.
How can AI-driven business analytics ease Q4 pressures?
Across our client base, there are clear pressures we see as businesses come to the final part of the year. What’s great is that each of those pressures is being eased – or eliminated – by using our AI-powered QEA platform.
How? Let’s take the most common Q4 pressures, and how QEA is giving businesses the insight and AI-driven actions they need to thrive.
Pressure #1: Revenue
Q4 is often seen as the ‘make or break’ period, where sales teams need to hit targets and turnover maximised. There’s a strong push to convert pipeline prospects into closed deals before the year ends.
The key to conversion is understanding. If your business is struggling to take conversations from ‘interested’ to ‘buying’, then perhaps there’s an issue with your process.
Data gives you the insights you need to understand the sticking points. It shows performance by geography, product and sales rep. It shows you where things have slipped through the gaps in your process and QEA, employing the power of AI, triggers manual and automated actions that keep prospects in the loop and deliver what they need to get them across the line.
What our QEA solution enabled:
One of our clients achieved a 25% increase in spares sales once QEA identified the correct processes to tighten up, so they delivered better, more informed customer service.
Pressure #2: Inventory management
Our clients are often dealing with either excess stock, or supply chain gaps. Both mean tricky decisions around clearance, procurement and pricing strategies. Poor inventory management can have a significant impact on your bottom line as you head towards year end.
Getting a handle on this critical part of the business is essential. We’ve helped many clients with this, using AI-driven business intelligence to improve supply chain and stock management.
What our QEA solution enabled:
We built an AI-powered smart order management system to give one of our clients complete, real-time visibility over their procurement process. This improved both supplier and customer relationships and allowed the client to reverse year-on-year profit erosion.
Pressure #3: Customer retention and renewals
Your year end is often when you renew customer contracts. It’s also the time when you want to upsell to those existing customers and deliver additional revenue. Retention intelligence and buying analytics are critical here.
There’s nothing more important than understanding what your customers are doing – and where they could be buying more. QEA’s intelligent business analytics are uncovering transformational customer insights that improve both retention and spend.
What our QEA solution enabled:
We built a ‘Know your customer’ dashboard for a client, which transformed their customer service strategy – and retention and renewals.
The client’s Financial Controller says:
“The ‘Know your Customer’ QEA solution transformed our after-sales strategy.
We now proactively engage customers at the right time. It has been a game-changer for our business.”
Pressure #4: Cash flow and collections
When we get into Q4, finance teams tighten credit control to improve working capital positions before year end closes.
Healthy working capital is critical to budgeting and planning. Understanding how to release more working capital into the business is allowing our clients to plan more strategically and more confidently.
What our AI-driven solution enabled:
We used our data exchange module, DeX, to bring all the data in the business into a central point for one of our large enterprise clients. This single source of truth was the foundation for AI-driven insights across the finance function which highlighted efficiencies and savings across the business. This released £9m in additional working capital each month.
Pressure #5: Budgeting, planning and scenario modelling
CFOs and FP&A teams are under pressure to finalise budgets for the next financial year. But they are often working with limited visibility. Faster, more dynamic forecasting tools bring confidence in the numbers and better strategic planning for the future.
It’s faster than you think to collect, clean and centralise the data in your business that supports better planning, budgeting and modelling. Why wait, when you could get real-time data now?
What our QEA solution enabled:
After establishing a single source of truth by centralising our client’s data, we developed AI-driven modules for credit control, cost book and P&L.
The client’s Senior Business Intelligence Analyst says:
“In the old days it would take three or four days every month to produce a report using a spreadsheet, and the figures might not be accurate.
The insight from having the data at our fingertips is now driving the business forward.”
Pressure #6: Sales and operations alignment
Misalignment between sales targets and what operations or production can realistically deliver is a common issue – especially where Q4 demand spikes are expected.
Beating this pressure means setting realistic targets and KPIs based on a secure and confident understanding of the data in the business. Assessing processes and production capacities allows businesses to set achievable targets across the whole financial year.
What our QEA solution enabled:
We worked with a client to understand production capacity, so that they could set achievable sales targets and fulfil orders on time and at a sustainable margin. The insights QEA generated allowed the company to accurately predict future capability and manage the order process better.
Is it your turn?
All these themes are consistent across different types of organisations, and across all industries. Our operational AI-driven platform, QEA, is already delivering embedded real-time intelligence, predictive insights, and proactive decision support across a wide range of companies. Could yours be next? Book a call today.
