Today’s society thrives on data. We only need to look to the five most valuable companies in the world to see that data is the lifeblood of these successful businesses.

However, many businesses are still not realising the full potential from the data that they have – or even setting themselves up to start using data properly. Such reticence is increasingly unfounded; the European Commission calculates that “even limited use of big data analytics solutions by the top 100 EU manufacturers could boost EU economic growth by an additional 1.9% by 2020.”

The message is clear. The data your business holds could be new fertile ground for growth and opportunity; and now is the time to discover it. And if you’re not in a position to do this yet, there are several steps you should take immediately.

How to harness data

First: be compliant. Your data initiatives won’t be worth their salt if you find yourself on the wrong side of legislation later down the line. Make sure you know exactly what is needed to look after data responsibly. It’s not worth losing money – and reputation over. Infosec, cyber essentials, data protection good practice and GDPR; these categories of data management affect every company no matter how big or small. Small firms all the way up to major corporations must comply equally; but some are caught short of these measures. In fact just recently under the new general data protection regulations act, Google has been fined a record sum over mismanagement of data in its personalised ads campaigns. The point here being that with data comes great responsibility.

If you’re storing the data of clients and partners, you also need to make them aware that you’re doing so. As we all experienced, the lead up to May 2018 was clearly a busy period for these notifications, what with GDPR coming into affect at the time. But rather than driving potential business away, this can actually be a very powerful message if framed correctly. Alongside reassurance that you’ll be doing everything responsibly and securely, articulating clearly how your new practices (whatever they may be) will in fact create additional value, benefit your clients and partners, and ultimately strengthen your relationships.

Data is big business, and the market is growing exponentially. Companies are hungry to create and harness data in the hunt to exploit new and lucrative pockets of growth and potential, and not necessarily for their own self improvement, but moreover to offer value service propositions to their existing as well as new customers. The data research camp has reacted, there is now an ever increasing availability of analytics solutions, market data feeds, service providers and white label re-sellers, both for crunching internal as well as externally prepackaged market data – all essentially with one purpose – to create value based intelligence.

But data analytics has for years been a conduit for data value creation; essentially by bringing together and analysing different information sets. An interesting fact about data is that in and of itself, it’s not necessarily very useful. But when combined with other data perhaps from other sources, patterns emerge and its full potential can be seen. Data sets such as spend, buying trends, share patterns, funding, balance sheets, cash flow, business behaviours, digital footprint, competitors, director profile management, regional analysis, supplier performance KPIs, red flags – are some examples of the types of information used to create data sets that inform decision making, negotiation, sourcing, investment, contract awards etc.

Intelligent data

As procurement practitioners and supplier relationship evangelists, we’ve always been passionate about creating the ultimate business relationship experience. Relationships have been in our DNA since the very beginning. We have found intelligent ways of building data analytics into business models and transition plans that help our clients in the process of restructure, to run clean risk controlled exits or acquisitions. For instance, within our Transition Modelling Discipline we use smart contract metadata to guide volume service transition in the event of M&A, divestment or outsource. This way we can facilitate a seamless and risk controlled transition of service and contract from one supplier or client to another.

Suppeco’s disruptive approach to relationship management optimisation across an ecosystem is a prime case study. Whilst Suppeco naturally promotes customer and supplier collaborative productivity, The dynamic data engines of it’s AutoRisk & Interpreter modules learn from every interaction, interrogating data to generate an infinite array of value based opportunities and scenarios to create exponential value to both our collaborating customers and suppliers.