As a Owner or consultant to a “Main Street” business, consider this question:

How much information is collected from each transaction? How well is the data used to improve the business?

The big-box retailers collect data, on each transaction at their registers, calling the data POS (Point of Sale) or “T-Logs”.  You can probably guess that most of those best known giants collectively complete many millions of transactions, and capture tons of raw data every day.

Here’s some interesting facts:

One terabyte = one trillion bytes. (A terabyte is equivalent to about 2 million books!) For instance, every day in 2009, Wal-Mart uploaded 20 million point-of-sale transactions, (T-logs), to an A&T Massively Parallel system with 483 processors running a centralized database*.

Raw data by itself does not provide much information. In today’s fiercely competitive business environment, companies need to rapidly turn these terabytes of raw data into significant insights about their customers and markets to guide their marketing, investment, and management strategies.

Data mining or knowledge discovery, is the computer-assisted process of digging through and analyzing enormous sets of data and then extracting the meaning of the data. Data mining tools predict behaviors and future trends, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions.

A well known axiom in data analysis is, “more data is always better than less”.  Therefore those AT&T MP Systems are amazingly fast and powerful tools deploying complex algorithms, enabling the results to provide both analysis of the past, but most importantly, highly accurate predictions of future customer buying patterns, and much, more.

Although a Big Box chain will always have the advantage of data volume, the SME who has adopted the computerized data rich approach to their business could benefit from deploying smaller less expensive data analysis, and predictive tools. As the field of new clients for the high-end $2-5 Million Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems is getting fewer;  more smaller, and successful software developers are providing CRM “in the cloud”, AKA: Software as a Service, (SaaS) for far smaller fee-based access to their client’s own data storage through secure links.

Do you think your SME might benefit from better knowledge about who your best clients or customers are, (collectively speaking), how they buy, what, when and why from you? How to reach out to more of those ideal customers?  How to have the right products available at the right time? Thereby being able to buy smarter? The list of advantages goes on and on.

If the answers to the above questions are yes, you can start looking into the possibilities right now by searching through a miriad  of information and companies on the web listed under Data mining, CRM, ERP, BPM, etc. Or you can fill out the form below.

You can also give TeamBRS a call. We have specialists in the field of Business Performance and Customer Relationship management.  Call us today for a free, no obligation discussion.

Please, at least comment on the above and let us know what you think.

Thanks, I trust this has been helpful.

*From: Data Mining by Doug Alexander http://www.laits.utexas.edu