To Gain Brand Loyalty, Companies Shift Toward Back Office Operations Analytics

All marketers seek a competitive advantage to, ultimately, gain brand loyalty. But now, instead of that competitive advantage being driven by customer-facing analytics, a new study shows that companies are shifting their focus toward to back office operations.

According to a new report from Capgemini Consulting’s Digital Transformation Institute, this shift has occurred during the past three years.

More than two-thirds (70%) now place more emphasis on operational analytics initiatives than on consumer-focused processes. Despite this, broad deployments remain limited and success even more so, with only 18% having both implemented analytics widely across operations and achieved desired objectives.

“Organizations are pivoting toward operational analytics as it can both increase the efficiency and performance of the back office as well as boost the customer experience in the front office,” said Anne-Laure Thieullent, Head of Big Data in Europe, for Capgemini’s Insights & Data Global Practice. “However, despite the focus, there are factors limiting the success of these projects; specifically siloed data sets, fragile governance models, inability to harness third-party data sources, and an absence of a strong mandate from leadership teams.”

The report titled, “Going Big: Why Organizations Need to Focus on Operations Analytics,” mapped organizations based on the extent to which their analytics initiatives were integrated with core operations processes and their success rate with initiatives, identifying four stages of operational analytics maturity:   

Game Changers – 18% of organizations – have integrated most of their analytics initiatives with their business processes and have realized the anticipated benefits from their analytics initiatives.

Optimizers – 21% – have typically realized early benefits from their analytics initiatives in a limited number of areas within their operations but have not yet scaled up to more complex initiatives.

Strugglers – 20% – have integrated analytics in most of their business processes but struggle to realize the benefits.

Laggards – 41% – are introducing analytics initiatives in their operations. They have mostly implemented proof of concepts but lag behind in terms of deriving benefits.

Capgemini Consulting's Digital Transformation Institute applied the four stages of operational analytics maturity to build a geographic picture of adoption and success rates around the world.

U.S. companies are not only the most advanced with their analytics initiatives, but also the most successful; 50% have successfully realized the desired benefits from operational analytics compared to only 23%  of Chinese respondents, despite China ranking highly for level of implementation. A strong contributing factor of the success of U.S. companies is their focus on setting up effective data and governance processes. Forty-seven percent of U.S.-based companies have made analytics an integral part of their decision-making process compared to just 28 percent in Europe. The prominence of U.S. organizations tallies with a recent resurgence in U.S. manufacturing and will drive U.S. manufacturing competitiveness in the coming years.

European companies are falling behind their U.S. counterparts, with German firms lagging behind in operational analytics compared to not only the U.S., but also the U.K. and the Nordics. This is surprising given the initiative in Germany towards Industry 4.0. The research indicates this is not just an operational issue – German companies are less likely to have integrated data sets or use external data sources - but it is also an issue of leadership. In the U.K., nearly 41% of companies had operations analytics initiatives led by C-level executives; in the U.S. this figure stood at 33%. By comparison, in Germany, only 14% of initiatives were led by key executives.

Organizations were headquartered in the U.S., China, U.K., Germany, France, The Netherlands, and the Nordics. All respondents represented $1 billion-plus revenue organizations.

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