4 6 Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory Deloitte. R13 5 Visual analytics for actionable insights Diving into big data to lead, navigate, and disrupt In today's marketplace, companies are under constant pressure to improve profitability. This is prompting them to seek higher levels of transparency into financial performance and uncover insights that can enhance decision making and create value. Armed with meaningful analytics, business leaders can recommend actions to improve the bottom line-adjusting pricing, reducing product costs, and rationalizing unprofitable products or services. Of course, in order to quantify value, business leaders need information-specifically, cost data. But with more data collection points than ever before, there can be a glut of information. With too much information to sift through easily, and without a clear understanding of the facts, leaders are often unable to provide insights and recommendations to leadership. Visual analytics can help. According to a Deloitte survey of financial executives, nearly two-thirds of the respondents said the most important function of cost information and related business analytics is supporting strategy and strategic decision making.1 Leveraging this information to maximize profitability and reduce cost is both a science and an art. And the upside is clear: Organizations that embrace complexity and use visual analytics to better understand their data can accelerate performance and gain competitive advantage. Organizations that embrace complexity and use visual analytics to better understand their data can accelerate performance and gain competitive advantage. 1 "Cost transparency: Helping finance create business value," Deloitte Development LLC, 2015.
Visual analytics for actionable insights: Diving into big data to lead, navigate, and disrupt Overcome fundamental hurdles As noted in figure 1, cost information is leveraged to support a range of decisions-from business strategy and operational performance improvement to evaluating the cost to service customers and contract profitability. The first challenge business leaders experience on the road to profitability management is obtaining meaningful cost information from the myriad data sources that may be available. To tackle the challenge of managing data, companies need a range of business analytics. A wide variety of factors, including increased globalization and years of industry consolidation, have complicated the ability to acquire data to perform analysis. The problem: Data is available, but it may not be easily connected because it's stored in various locations and systems. For large organizations with multiple business lines, the move to a shared-services model has also made attributing costs to products or customer groups difficult. This is primarily because these service models require organizations to change how costs are captured and then allocated across businesses. Complex supply chains that necessitate ongoing transfer-pricing activities can also make it difficult for companies to get an accurate view of profitability. These complexities foster beliefs that the data is "bad" or too difficult to mine. Fortunately, there are new tools to help sort it out. Follow the brighter path ahead Visual analytics tools and techniques have been developed to aggregate multiple data sets from disparate sources. Unique identifiers, such as product numbers, transaction codes, cost centers,