Intone’s client, a national real estate development and investment firm, sought assistance to change their current planning and forecasting model for populating forward-looking statements and other similar processes to create better information for more timely and accurate estimates. We focused on the client’s need for better utilization of available methods and resources across the business to improve the financial planning and forecasting of data and operational results to increase the efficient and effective delivery of competitive services using innovative techniques (i.e. Business Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, etc.).
Intone conducted facilitated sessions and discussion meetings with business process owners to facilitate ‘root cause analysis’ of the business’ processes.
The first goal was to determine the key business decisions and root cause drivers and develop a set of desired outcomes (i.e. increased sales, lower land purchase and development costs, reduced operating expenses and overhead, more accurate cost allocations and profit projections, etc.)
The second goal was to evaluate which of the identified core business drivers would provide the most impact and then associate predictive analytics to these impacts and drivers to anticipate future events. Once completed, we then used the list of core business decisions to determine and assess which drivers were the most important to focus on. These decisions and drivers were the ones that impacted the most areas of the business and had the largest effect on results.
The third goal for Intone was to develop an effective analytics platform covering key performance measures and perform testing procedures to ‘prove the concept.’ And finally, the last goal was to populate the analytics with real-time data, monitor its performance in production and create information dashboards to report expected output regarding operations.
Intone managed the design, development/build, testing and training phases of the engagement. We assisted our client in the identification and selection of several on-premise current analytic software application vendors. Once the selection was made and in place, we proceeded to design, implement and test the new platform ensuring compatibility of the new big data analytics platform with the client’s existing ERP system’s data warehouse.
Intone provided the necessary on-premises enterprise and solution architects, business and data analysts, IT integration and training and quality assurance leads to execute on this engagement. The assembled team of in-house IT staff, Intone’s PM, SME’s, analysts and client management formed a successful and effective program structure and partnership to provide for a systematic and timely implementation of the predictive analytics solution on a budget.
The data planning, forecasting and predictive analytics project successfully met our clients goals and our client now has an innovative forecasting model that provides the key metrics and the predictive planning and analytical capabilities needed to improve their ability to more effectively leverage data to manage operations and plan for the future. The client is expanding the use of this new operations management tool to manage other inputs, events, and data to gain real-time entity-wide insight.