DECEMBER 1998 BROADSHEET - Database Mining, 21st Century Business Philosophy
The title for our November meeting Tactics For The 21st Century might have given the impression that we were looking far into the future - but of course we are only about 400 days away from the next century. The impact of the techniques we heard about could be even more immediate.
Activity based management was explained to us by Richard Neal of Unity Business Solutions. He got our attention very quickly by pointing out that most of our profits come from a very small percentage of our customers - as few as 12% of customers in one case study generated 65% of sales and 63% of the gross profit. The secret is how to identify which customers are which and this is where 'activity based costing' comes in. Richard explained how plotting net margin against sales volume for individual customers gives us a tool to identify where the profits are generated. Dividing the resulting plot into a 5 x 5 matrix allows us to see which customers fall into 'Box 25' (low sales value and low net margin). These are the customers that we should consider giving up or try to change their behaviour. If you want to know more, contact Richard at 01295 690793 or e-mail him at rn@unitybs.demon.co.uk
Our second speaker was Ann Chapman-Daniel of Minesoft. Too often companies have valuable information in their databases but don't know what it is. New software is now available which will trawl through your data automatically and pull out information and relationships which could be of great benefit to you in your business, for example:
- the buying habits of your customers;
- the most profitable stocks and shares;
- customers who are likely to default on loans;
- the diagnosis of a patient's condition;
- the reasons why a manufacturing process starts to go wrong.
The new software, known by the tradenames Wiz Why, Wiz Rule and Wiz Doe can also be installed to work alongside your existing database. In this way it can check new data entries against the rules and characteristics it has found in your existing data - a useful way to flag up errors in data entry.
The Minesoft Company have all this software available and are willing to check out your existing data base to show you what valuable information lays hidden there. Call Ann Chapman or Ophir Daniel on 0181 404 0651 or e-mail achapman@minesoft.com. Their web page is at www.minesoft.com
More people are surfing in on the Club's web site which makes it all worthwhile. Do take advantage of the feedback forms both for making comments, gleaning information and making requests for links to your sites; a completely free service for members. There are more details of the Club itself and of the last meeting, an announcement of the next and what we hope will prove a useful and entertaining links page. The address of our web pages? http://wwweb.org/cetc/
Our Vice-Chairman and Secretary, Malcolm and Linda Wilkinson have also got their act together and produced a web page for their company, Technology for Industry Ltd. You can view it via our links page, as above, or go direct to www.tfi-ltd.co.uk
The Club is very fortunate in benefiting from the sponsorship of the following organisations:-
There are also other companies who give us generous help with specific meetings and services.
Calendar
© 2004 - Cambridge Europe & Technology Club