How to Put Your Data to Work Externally to Create New Value

Organizations are increasingly thinking about ways they can harness the power of data to get the most comprehensive and up-to-date intelligence possible, which will inform the way they conduct their business.

While all organizations rely on data to some extent, the way they plan, adopt and use data varies dramatically, and can be the difference between creating value for an organization, or not. Taking data and sharing it outside of the walls of the company allows organizations to create additional value for their own end users.

Domo’s solutions have been employed by a myriad of companies trying to build an intelligent business ecosystem to deliver customer value.

Take Konica Minolta (KM), a multinational medical device manufacturer specializing in digital radiography equipment for diagnostic imaging, as an example. It utilized Domo in AeroRemote Insights, a cloud-based analytics solution for the medical devices it manufactures. The system collects and aggregates mission-critical data such as exam volume, rejected image reasons, and exposure levels for exams. The data is automatically integrated into easy to interpret visualizations that are useful for productivity assessment, identification of training opportunities, and asset management.

KM realized that to stand out from its competitors it needed to focus on optimizing the customer experience. It saw service contracts as an opportunity to add value to deals beyond traditional equipment maintenance and upkeep. AeroRemote Insights began in 2016 with KM offering customers device analytics along with the equipment, first by delivering a PDF file to customers monthly that showed device usage and performance data.

In the first two years following the program’s debut, Konica Minolta saw an almost 10% increase in units under service contract, generating significant new profits, and a 472% annual return on investment.

The Domo platform enabled KM to efficiently bring together large volumes of data, and provide control to the organization sharing content to their customers and partners. The company was able to analyze data and deliver insights to customers who are less well-equipped to uncover those insights for themselves. By successfully leveraging these insights to guide their operations (X-ray protocols, patient scheduling, etc.), customers can achieve cost and time savings that are characteristic to traditional analytics deployments.

According to McKinsey, the ability to capitalize on what data has to offer hinges on a series of fundamentals. “Broadly speaking, capturing the most value from the wealth of potential data begins with excellence in identifying, capturing, and storing that data; moves through the technical capability to analyze and visualize that data; and ends with an organization that is able to complement analytics with the domain knowledge of human talent and rely on a cross-functional, agile structure to implement relevant insights,” it says.

Amsterdam-based fitness software company Virtuagym is another enterprise which has taken their internal data and used it outside of the walls of their company to provide value to customers and increase profitability. The organization’s customers, which includes gyms, personal trainers and fitness studios, wanted easy-to-access granular data on their members’ habits and routines.

Virtuagym tried to build the customer-facing dashboard themselves but quickly decided a more effective route would be to use Domo Embed, which gave them access to business analytics but built into the Virtuagym system. The new data dashboard gave customers valuable insight into the typical profile of their customer, which fitness classes were busiest, who the most popular trainers were, and so on.

Three questions to ask before creating external value through data

According to a report by Harvard Business Review (HBR), every company should ask themselves three questions to examine how its big data can create customer value.

1. What type of information will help my customers reduce their costs or risks? “Increasingly customers are looking for specific answers to questions, such as what do customers like me think of this product or service. Answering such granular questions requires a much deeper understanding of what customers are looking for, and how they see themselves. That is an opportunity for the next generation of big data value creation,” the report says.
2. What type of information is currently widely dispersed, but would yield new insight if aggregated? Is there any incidentally produced data (such as location data) that could be valuable when assembled?
3. Is there enough diversity and variance among my customers to enable them to benefit from aggregating others’ data with theirs? HBR uses the example of a company selling farm inputs (seeds, fertilizer and pesticides) which can collect data from farmers with dispersed plots of land to determine which combinations of inputs are optimal under different conditions.

Aggregating data from many farms operating under diverse soil, climatic, and environmental conditions can yield much better information about the optimal inputs for each individual farm than any single farmer could obtain from his own farm alone, regardless of how long he had been farming that parcel.

To find out more about how Domo can unlock your business’s valuable data, please click here.