Operational performance analytics: questions
The questions we are asked most often about operational performance analytics, answered without the marketing layer.
What is performance intelligence for?
Finding the decisions behind a number that moved. A margin drop reported at month end is a fact; which product, which store and which pricing or replenishment decision produced it is what someone can act on, and that chain is what this connects.
How is this different from a BI dashboard?
A dashboard shows the metric and leaves the attribution to the reader. That works when there is one obvious cause and fails when there are four interacting ones, which is the normal case. The difference is not visualisation; it is that the decisions are recorded, so the chain from cause to number exists to be traced.
Does it need the other solutions to be in place?
It gets substantially better with them, because a recorded decision is far easier to attribute than an inferred one. But it works against historical data alone, and that is often how organisations start — the first thing it surfaces is usually a pattern nobody had the time to look for.
Who uses it day to day?
The people accountable for the numbers rather than the analysts who prepare them. If a category manager needs a request to an analytics team to find out why margin moved, the answer arrives after the decision window has closed.
Related: Demand Intelligence · Inventory Intelligence