BITSoftware / Blog

From Government departments through small local companies, information can be extremely valuable to organizations. However, this useful information often ends up trapped in files or databases, inaccessible to the average employee or user. Also, the explosion of information stored in multiple formats that needs to be accessed by both internal staff and a distributed workforce (dealers, vendors, etc) only complicates the problem. The need for organizations to quickly respond to market changes, innovate, and accelerate their time to market increased in direct proportion to their structural complexity. So, it’s no wonder that 39% of a knowledge worker’s time is wasted on searching for information or recreating existing content.

To help those organizations to discover information that previously were not „findable”, Google developed Google Search Appliance (GSA). With its ability to search for information stored in over 220 file types across multiple enterprise systems (CRM, ERP, financials system, business intelligence systems, Google Docs, Google Sites, graphic file format, etc), GSA is a relatively simple, highly scalable intranet search solution that has brought universal search capabilities to several different organizations.

Using Google Search Appliance, your company can increase employees productivity by making it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, when they need it. Also, it can improve customer satisfaction by providing fast, reliable search results and seamlessly integrating with common contact center applications. GSA can also reduce administration time, because some of the more powerful features are available right out of the box, so less time and resources are spent implementing a world-class enterprise search solution.

But this is not all. Because in the last years, more and more companies started using cloud-based applications from Google (more than four million businesses already run Google Apps), Google Search Appliance got a new feature, Cloud Connect, which lets employees search across on-premise and cloud-based content from a single search box, delivering more comprehensive results and improving productivity.

Cloud Connect displays relevant, personalized results from Google Docs and Google Sites alongside results from more traditional repositories, like file shares and content management systems. Easier access to collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with Cloud Connect speeds up how quickly coworkers can complete projects. For companies that already deployed Google Apps and Google Search Appliance, the Cloud Connect feature brings “universal search” to another level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.

As you move your business to the cloud, Google Search Appliance can be an important bridge between on-premise and cloud-based systems, while enhancing employee collaboration and strengthens your company`s ability to access and disseminate organizational knowledge.

Sources: google.com/enterprise, Google Official Blog, Computer World, PC World

If your company activates in retail, distribution, services, telecom, or in any other consumer-oriented business environment, you know that understanding customer motivation to do or not do a certain acquisition is essential for your business survival and development. You need to quickly identify changes in consumer tastes and preferences and act immediately to improve their experiences.

Therefore, sales and marketing divisions must know any time how many customers were gained or lost in the past month and why, which are their profile and income, what products they like and what goods they never purchased, etc. Why do they need this information? First, for in-depth understanding of consumer behavior. Second, to develop specific strategies in order to have loyal clients, optimize customer profitability and identify new sales opportunities.

With SocrateBI’s Sales and Customer Analysis Module (SCAM), your company gain  deep insight into customer behavior, enabling organizations to reduce attrition of high value customers and identify cross-sell opportunities. You can also identify the number of new and lost customers (in the past month or quarter) or the customer loyalty, by length of trade relations with your company.

Also, you will see the customer value and the contribution of each active client to company’s income (the customer value is calculated based on some qualitative and quantitative factors, being an important measure for organization’s customer quality).

Based on information provided by SocrateBI SCAM related to distribution of discounts and revenues, operating income and adjusted tax margin by category and brand, you can perform market basket analysis and cross-sell opportunities, in order to improve sales.

Built on the MicroStrategy platform, the Sales and Customer Analysis Module include reports, scorecards (a specific collection of related reports), and dashboards (a collection of related reports customized for optimum display). In addition, some reports show summarized information to help you see trends, while others display very specific, detailed data about your customers.