Making decisions based off of business intelligence is hardly a new concept. However, with the rise of big data and advanced analytics solutions, the importance of collecting new data sets to feed your BI program has never been greater. In this interview with Yusuf Gulamhussain, VP of Analytic & Information Management at Systech Solutions, we learn what Systech is doing to help customers take their BI initiatives to a much higher level.
Could you provide a brief overview of the solution that Systech provides?
Yusuf: We are an analytics and information management organization, and our goal is to enable our customers to identify, collect, and analyze the full life cycle of data within an organization. We help to identify the data sources, process the data, organize and make sense out of the data. The end objective is to provide the data in a fashion which is presentable to business users and then take the information gained and turn it into actionable insights.
So, in a nutshell, we provide closed loop business intelligence to our customers.
And what kind of situations do your clients typically come to you with?
Yusuf: The primary aspect of business intelligence (BI) is to design analytics. In essence, answering the question, “How do I use my information to improve and optimize my business?” That’s the bottom line of what BI offers to all organizations, and as a service organization, that’s what we offer to our customers.
So there are two ways in which a customer comes to us. One is, “Hey, do you have any specific expertise within a certain industry vertical, or within a certain business functional area such as marketing or finance?” And from that standpoint, we can help them build an entire platform to enable that kind of analytics.
The other way customers typically approach us is more from a technology standpoint where they are looking for tools and products out there in the marketplace that can help them build their BI platform. In this scenario, we work with technology vendors like Connotate to see what problems can be solved with best-in-class technology, and then we bring it to our customers.
So essentially, there are two primary approaches. One from a business standpoint. The other, from a technology standpoint.
How does your solution help your clients make better business decisions?
Yusuf: That’s our bread and butter, actually. Our solutions are designed to help them make better decisions, and we believe that one way to do that is to make sure that businesses have access to all of the data points within the organization. It’s not just having access to data, but having access to clean data, data that is more integrated, quality checked and available on a platform that makes it easy to analyze. So once we provide our customers with our integrated data set, the next thing they can do is start looking at trends and patterns that they never saw before because they never had access to data that was so integrated and so well connected.
Can you tell me about the coolest client example you can think of? Tell me about the sources of the data and how you helped the client make better business decisions?
Yusuf: We are working with one of the very latest and new-age automotive manufacturing companies, and we are helping them by trying to establish an environment where they can start an exploration of data without necessarily building the entire business and delivery stack. So to us – and in the marketplace – this is a new approach to BI where we enable our customers to explore data in its open format. So essentially, they have access to all data points within a platform that they can just dive deep into, mine it, and slice it in the way they want.
The main objective is to figure out key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of the business departments within the organization. This includes sales, marketing, production line manufacturing, and customer service. With customer service, same day turnaround is one of the KPIs. Our customer wanted to gain a clear understanding of what leads to a car being in the service center for longer than a day. That visibility was never there before because they never could figure out what issues were predominant and what issues led to more delays. By building the BI environment in a more exploratory fashion, however, we were able to really look at a complete picture of how the cars are being serviced.
And the reason why this is a cool example is that our customer is really deploying new age BI, as opposed to traditional BI, which they had used in the past.
How does your partnership with Connotate enhance the solutions that you provide to your customers?
Yusuf: Connotate is an extremely powerful Web data extraction platform. We discovered Connotate about 12 plus months ago while working on an opportunity where the majority of the data was coming off of the Web. The prospect had trouble bringing data into the organization in a fashion that was automated, clean, and repeatable. Prior to working with Connotate, they were collecting the data manually. They would go in and log into every single website and scrape information out of it, glean information, and plug it into Excel, and then process the information. This was a very cumbersome process, both from a time perspective and from a cost perspective.
So for that kind of use case – when the prospect relies on harvesting data from online sources – we join hands with Connotate because Connotate’s Webdata extraction product has a really powerful engine that can harvest data from any website through the use of automated Agents. This eliminates a lot of manual work, which is very prone to errors and requires a lot of manual revisions. Now we are able to demonstrate to prospects that by using Connotate, they can automate the entire process, make it extremely foolproof, and bring their harvested data set into your environment. So our partnership with Connotate helps us with the pitch and helps us to win business.
Could you tell me what advice you would give someone who was ready to take on a BI project and might be able to leverage the Connotate and Systech partnership?
Yusuf: So I think one aspect of preparation or even identification is to figure out what is my biggest data source, where is my data coming from, and what percentage of that data set is coming from the Web. Getting a sense of your data sources is absolutely critical.
In the bigger picture when we are talking about an end-to-end life cycle of data from its source all the way to becoming valuable insights to an organization, collecting the data is the very first step in the process. Unless you can get your hands on clean and accurate data, the remainder of the platform is meaningless. So it’s a key piece of the puzzle and is the reason why we are very excited to be working with Connotate.
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