business intelligence

Do you make important decisions based on complete and accurate information or do you run your business on instinct and gut feel? Is your business performing as well as it could? Often people’s answer is no or not really. This is where Business Intelligence can come in and help you. Business Intelligence is all about putting appropriate information in front of you that helps you to make better, more informed decisions.

If you have a complex supply chain, imagine how useful it would be to save significant costs by optimising your business through Business Intelligence tools. Or how much money you’d save if you had clear insight from your CRM that helped you to optimise your product development cycles. All of which could help  you to see where the real issues are, for example that you weren’t losing business to competitors, or that your product development cycles were not synchronised to your customers buying cycles. Business Intelligence helps you to make the best decisions for your business, pushing you to become greater and reach the potential hidden inside your business.

Business Intelligence is trusted information that empowers you to make quality decisions about your business. It provides insight into your business and should drive commercial benefits from your decision making. If your data isn’t accurate or complete then the decisions you make could be wrong.

As a first step to getting on top of these issues we offer a Data Review to assess the state of your Business Intelligence and provide informed recommendations as to how you can improve it. We find this is a great way for our clients to obtain a quick win, and after the review even if you decide not to use our services, you will be left with deliverables that will be incredibly useful for your business going forward. To read more about what why you need a Data Review check out our post here.
We’ve been helping both very large companies and SMEs identify and implement trusted Business Intelligence solutions since 2003. We have a proven track record of delivering valuable solutions. Our goal is to work with you to ensure that you’re making good, informed decisions from your Business Intelligence

change management 

Why do I need to speak to Leopard about Change Management?

The importance of effective Change Management cannot be understated, i.e. the people side of implementing projects. For example: 

• Are you clearly highlighting risks and issues in your projects?
• Are you communicating clearly and regularly to all stakeholders involved in the project?
• Are you getting their buy-in from the start and as the project progresses?

Change Management, like Project Management, can make or break a project. It’s also often one of the most overlooked pieces of a PMO team. Although Leopard is a data company, we have recruited Change Management specialists because we recognise that the people-side of project implementation is absolutely key.

Change Management in it’s simplest form is about:

• Appropriating risks and issues.
• Engaging with all stakeholders through defined communication plans.
• Writing project proposals that clearly address the key issues for all the stakeholder groups.

Change Management as a practice is growing. More and more businesses understand the importance of their people. Project and program managers are appropriating risks and issues to change management requirements, stakeholders are more open to engaging with change practitioners, methodologies are maturing, and project proposals are highlighting the need for change management.

Although we are primarily a data company, we are also experts in change management and have recruited experts in this specialist field.

Change Management are often areas that companies overlook or are not sure how to approach. With extensive experience in Data and People Projects, we could help you set up the management to ensure delivery.

data warehousing 

We often mention data warehousing and people automatically think that it’s just about storing data, but actually data warehousing is more about leveraging your data to bring you value, not just about making sure it’s backed up and redundant.

Disclaimer: a data warehouse is not a building where you keep all your information, it’s so much more!

Imagine if you were able to automate the repetitive, manual tasks of producing your monthly management reports for your business, which takes your analysts hours, if not days. This is just one example of where a data warehouse would bring value to your business. Ultimately a data warehouse is there to automate the collection and collation of data so that it can be visualised in a way that helps you make better business decisions.

A data warehouse is really about positioning your data in your organisation to facilitate you to be more innovative, understand the market better, or optimise your business.

Since 2003, we have implemented 10s of data warehouses successfully into our customers businesses that automated their manual processes and visualised valuable information for a wider audience that previously wasn’t available in a secure and redundant way.

We’ve written a number of Case Studies and White Papers on data warehousing, which have more detail of what we do.

project management  

Project Management is often overlooked, but it’s so important.

Often important things are forgotten about and then people wonder why the end result costs more than they’d hoped, taken longer than they’d planned and didn’t do what they wanted it to do. This is down to the Project Management and the experience of the Project Managers. Often this can be down to something as simple as not having a communication plan for your project.

We’ve been managing systems integration, software development and data projects since 2003 and have delivered many successful projects. We’ve learned how to make sure that a project is delivered within a budget, according to a timeframe that’s planned and that the solution does what it needs to do.

We work with a number of different methodologies for Project Management, with the main two being Agile and Waterfall. We’re Prince2 and Agile certified.

We’ve often been awarded with the opportunity to work on recovery projects and have delivered these too.

In a nutshell, we’ve delivery 10s of successful projects over the last 15 years for a number of different customers. It’s very important to us to manage projects well and ensure that they are delivered on time, to budget and that what is delivered is fit for purpose.

systems integration

Are you frustrated with your systems not talking to each other properly? 

Systems Integration is often looked on as really complex, difficult to achieve and often left to IT to get on with. We’ve observed that it’s not given the appropriate attention and therefore systems don’t talk to each other properly.

What do we mean by “talk to each other”? Let’s say you have a CRM system and a data warehouse that reports on the performance of your sales. In a case like this, you’ll probably want to use some of your customer and sales process information in your sales reports. For example, marrying your sales performance with your win/loss analysis. This would only be possible if your CRM and data warehouse were talking to each other. This is system integration. 

Over the last 15 years, time and time again we’ve realised the importance of systems integration and we’ve used our experience to build a methodology of how make system integration successful in both the design and execution of the technology.