Postal Solutions: Using Analytics for Smarter Business Decisions

Recent Accenture research “Getting Serious About Analytics: Better Insights, Better Decisions, Better Outcomes,”  finds that high-performance businesses—those that substantially outperform competitors over the long term and across economic, industry, and leadership cycles—are five times more likely to use data analytics strategically compared with low performers. Going far beyond data mining, advanced data analytics uses an integrated framework of quantitative methods to help a business derive insights from its data, then take action on those insights to shape business decisions and, ultimately, to improve outcomes.

For postal organizations struggling to improve services and cement customer loyalty all while reducing costs, tapping into their pools of quantitative data to shape management thinking, improve operations and predict and act on customer behavior offers a key source of competitive advantage. Regardless of how much data postal organizations have at their disposal, without the means to make sense of it all, continuing to gather it will at best be pointless and at worst, a resource-wasting exercise.

Analytics solutions allow postal organizations to get smarter about customer behavior, the supply chain, product development, talent management, and other areas of their business.

Recognized for our insights and industry experience, Accenture has continually increased the sophistication and scope of our analytic capabilities—from batch reporting in the 1970s, to pioneering information management and performance management solutions in 1992, to the creation of a dedicated information management services organization in 2005. Accenture Analytics is our next-generation response to a corporate legacy of ongoing innovation.  We offer:

• Best people. Our global network of professionals offers a combination of deep analytic skills, industry knowledge and process experience.
  
  
• Proven offerings. Thanks to our years of experience in the field, we offer more than 100 industry, cross-industry and function-specific offerings; more than 200 standards and industry-leading practices; automated development tools; and reusable architecture components.
  
  
• Unparalleled Research & Development. Accenture Analytics is the culmination of a long history of innovation in information management.
  
  
• Strategic alliances. Although we are vendor neutral, we have formed an ecosystem of strategic vendors with whom we team in analytics, including core alliances with SAS, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.
  
  
• Global scale. Through the Accenture Global Delivery Network, Accenture industrializes analytics processes through automation and continuous improvement, creating a vast engine to drive data-driven insight.
  
  

Accenture Analytics uses its experience, offerings and solutions to reduce risk and speed time to value, helping you compete on analytics across any business function or process—in any industry or geography.

Accenture offers practical advice about how analytics can help postal agencies achieve high performance.

Start small and move up the analytics value chain
The postal analytics journey begins with a small step: surveying your organization’s analytic capabilities. The Accenture Analytics Maturity Assessment for Public Sector  is a fast way to assess your organization’s analytic maturity against the five steps of the DELTA model—data, enterprise, leadership, targets and analysts. Free and online, the survey takes less than 15 minutes to complete and provides instant feedback on your maturity score.

Decide where to focus
Once you know where you land on the maturity curve, where do you focus your first efforts? Accenture has developed the Analytics Value Assessment Tool (AVAT) to help identify, prioritize and quantify analytic opportunities. AVAT helps to easily compare and contrast the true value of each capability, and understand the full process, cost, time, and requirements to implement it, get the organization to adopt and leverage it, and finally, generate tangible business benefits.

Set up an analytics operating model that works for you
Once you have your analytics priorities straight, you need to get the right supporting infrastructure in place. Accenture has developed a tool to help postal organizations work through key questions across four main areas (processes, people/organization, IT and data) that feed into an optimal analytics operating model.