Santa’s a busy guy – the whole year rests on getting one night right.
Santa has a lot on his plate. He has to manage the production of millions of different gifts every year! Analysing the ever-expanding naughty and nice list, wish list and delivery locations whilst ensuring his elves are maintaining an efficient work environment.
What if Santa decided to level up his operations by becoming more data-driven to create a more productive work environment – where would he start?
1. Define and identify
If we were working with Santa on this project, we’d begin by defining with him his operations data-driven objectives and identify the relevant data sources required to achieve these. This is the beginning of shaping Santa’s data-driven culture so it can be adopted within his operations. Here, Santa has to lead by example. For the elves to effectively adopt this new approach within their manufacturing process, Santa has to be clear and precise on what he wants to achieve.
2. Build a solid foundation
Once we know what reporting Santa needs to keep his operation in check, we go about extracting, transforming and loading his data into a secure data warehouse. This is the most crucial part of the process – setting a solid data foundation that is aligned to his operations. This step is crucial to streamlining the reporting process to make those meaningful decisions, getting this part right means the success of the project!
This foundation has to be secure too, we don’t want anyone from the naughty list changing their category so by utilising the cloud we can give Santa complete governance over who can access what list and also allows him to access reports where ever he may be in the world.
3. Maintain the data-driven culture
Adopting a new process takes time so maintaining motivation is key for successful adoption. Remember the elves have been doing the same process for years now so a new way of doing things may come as a shock! Santa needs to be ready to listen and respond to the team if they have any issues.
4. Make informed decisions
Presentation is everything, especially for tracking presents! We’d create a clear, automated visual reporting dashboard to make Santa’s data come to life. It would seem like magic, even to Santa. This removes the manual handling of data that took days to produce reports – which were outdated by the time they were produced – allowing for more reliable and accurate information to inform his decisions.
Outcome?
Santa is now working off a real-time dashboard that displays the information that is relevant to him. He can now make more informed decisions that yield the best outcome for his operations. The elves have moved from manually producing reports to working of automated reports that assist them in refining their manufacturing process to produce more gifts and make more time to look after the reindeer.
Santa has a lot of data but these-days, managing large volumes of data is easy when you have a foundation in place to support your data-driven goals. So Santa, if you reading this – contact us today if you’re interested in discussing how your organisation can benefit from being data-driven.
