Being Recession Ready

After a recession, recovery will always be difficult. This isn’t ground-breaking news, and nobody knows a sure-fire way out of a recession either on a global or a national scale – but individual organisations can act early in order to withstand these uncertain times and be in position to prosper once on the other side.

Different organisations are impacted differently after a recession. Every period of economic downturn sees winners and losers, however only a few can ensure their long term future will be prosperous when the next wave of economic uncertainty hits without being recession ready.

Organisations that prioritise data, real-time insights and analytics will be best placed to thrive in a recession.  Business decisions need to be evidence-based and therefore should be ascertained from clear, accurate data.  Insights must where possible be updated in real-time to aid understanding of the ever-changing marketplace.  Using complex analytics (encompassing machine learning and artificial intelligence) organisations must understand the full context of their data and insights and drive towards more effective decision making.

We have identified the key areas that we believe organisations should prioritise with increased necessity in the event of a recession:

1. Operational efficiency: demand is likely to be more volatile than ever and so it is now critical to the viability of your organisation to withstand this volatility by becoming more efficient
2. Customer insights: understanding this ever-changing customer base in real time will allow you to focus your organisation
3. Adapting analytical models: many, if not most, organisations use algorithms and data models to underpin their operations. However, in the current climate many of these have become unreliable.  The key is to repurpose and to take advantage of this new market edge
4. Operational flexibility: the marketplace is changing so operations need to be focussed accordingly, with built-in flexibility

Every part of the value chain can be optimised using better, real-time insights and analytics – and a recession adds necessity and urgency to these challenges.   In this series of blogs, we will be discussing the topics of using Augmented Intelligence to make data-driven decisions to optimise merchandising and warehousing decisions, driving operational efficiency and freeing-up your workforce to address higher value activities through Intelligent Automation, and identifying at-risk customers to help reduce the operational impact on your organisation.  No matter your organisational challenge, we can prove that data and analytics will make you Recession Ready.

For further reading on this (and much of the above) see here.

Dougie Mackenzie

Senior Consultant, Insight Driven Enterprise (IDE)

Dougie leads IDE’s Operational Analytics capability and has over 7 years’ experience helping organisations improve their operations through better use of data and analytics.