Save on auto and heavy duty truck repair bills with our wide variety of Engine Diagnostic Tools, Diagnostic Software and shop toolscomponents for all of your vehicle. Search engine optimization SEO is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engines unpaid resultsoften referred. Building an Insights Engine. Idea in Brief. The Imperative. Asterisk Sound Files Wav more. Operational skill once conferred competitive advantage now its table stakes. The new source of advantage is customer centricity deeply understanding your customers needs and fulfilling them better than anyone else. The Research. A study involving more than 1. Having an independent insights and analytics function that participates fully in business planning and strategy is key. The Case. Unilevers CMI group embodies the so called insights engine through its expertise in synthesizing data, close collaboration with other functions, innovative use of new technologies and programs, and whole brain mindset that balances creative and analytical thinking. Operational skill used to confer long term advantage. If you had leaner manufacturing, made higher quality products, or had superior distribution, you could outrun competitors. But today those capabilities are table stakes. The new source of competitive advantage is customer centricity deeply understanding your customers needs and fulfilling them better than anyone else. You need data to accomplish this. Yet having troves of data is of little value in and of itself. What increasingly separates the winners from the losers is the ability to transform data into insights about consumers motivations and to turn those insights into strategy. This alchemy requires innovative organizational capabilities that, collectively, we call the insights engine. The vital role of the insights engine was revealed in a global market research study led last year by the strategy consultancy Kantar Vermeer. The study, called Insights. Of the factors that were found to drive customer centric growth, none mattered more than a firms insights engine, embodied in its insights and analytics function. While these go by many namesincluding I A, consumer and market insights, and customer intelligencefor simplicity we refer to them as insights functions here. In this article we describe the elements of the insights engine and show how it works at consumer goods giant Unilever. The firms 4. 00 plus brands, which include Dove, Knorr, and Axe, generated 6. Performance at that level requires the full engagement of the companys 1. R D to marketing and finance. But as well show, its the insights engine, manifested in the firms Consumer and Market Insights CMI group, that underpins Unilevers customer centric strategy. A New Strategy. When Unilever released its first quarter results in April 2. CFO Graeme Pitkethly, addressing analysts, announced a major new initiative to shift resources to local markets around the world. He noted that consumers are increasingly seeking brands and products that align with their cultural identity and lifestyle. The result is that local firms, particularly in emerging markets, are growing fast and strengthening their competitive positions. The new program, he explained, would clarify accountability and make Unilevers marketing teams more agile both globally and locally. Country business heads had recognized the rising popularity of local brands, and the implications were being discussed separately at many levels across the firm. A presentation to the operating board by CMIs head, coauthor Stan Sthanunathan, drew on this intelligence and on CMIs own review of what was happening. Sthanunathan walked the board members through an analysis of why local brands were growing, what threat this posed, and how Unilever could compete. The presentation focused attention, catalyzed the conversation about strategy, and ultimately led to changes in both organization and mindset. One challenge, as you might expect, was introducing a software center that disrupted the existing GEs power structure, which resides in its business units, such as. The IW engine is a game engine developed by Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games for the Call of Duty series. The engine was originally based on id Tech 3. Virtual Engine Dyno The Ultimate In Race Engine Simulation Software. Includes information on the Virtual Engine Dyno Simulation and Free Virtual Engine Calculator. Free Engine Building SoftwareUnilevers new initiative showcases the type of high level advisory role that leading insights functions are increasingly taking. A decade ago, this sort of strategic involvement by a customer intelligence operation was almost unheard of. The market research department typically was a reactive service unit reporting to the marketing function, fielding marketing requests, and producing performance management reports. Over time, however, market research departments have been shifting from merely supplying data to interpreting itdistilling insights about consumers motivations and needs on the basis of their behavior. Driven by the imperative to become customer centric, leading firms are now completing the transformation of market research groups into true insights engines with a fundamentally strategic role. At Unilever, CMIs prominently communicated mission is to inspire and provoke to enable transformational action. Note that the word insight is missingintentionally. Thats because insights merely provide a means to the desired end action that drives business growth. In the text that follows, we describe 1. Unilever. We divide these into two broad groups operational characteristics, such as functional independence and experimental orientation, and people characteristics, such as business acumen and well balanced analytic and creative thinking styles. Operational Characteristics. I/51PTjAV0OpL.jpg' alt='Free Virtual Engine Building Software' title='Free Virtual Engine Building Software' />Directory of recommended free and paid SEO tools across every aspect of the industry keyword research, competitive intelligence, web analytics, link building, paid. In 1985 the Science Museum in London set out to construct a working Difference Engine No. Babbages original designs dating from 18479. The. ReconArts reconciliation matching engine software and tools use the most advanced functionality on the market today. Learn about the benefits here. Search Engine Land is the leading industry source for daily, mustread news and indepth analysis about search engine technology. Seven of the key characteristics relate to the way insights engines operate. Data synthesis. Until recently, large firms had an advantage over smaller rivals simply because of the scale of their market research capability. Today research that once took months and cost millions can be done for a fraction of that price and in mere days. What matters now is not so much the quantity of data a firm can amass but its ability to connect the dots and extract value from the information. This capability differentiates successful organizations from less successful ones According to the i. This proficiency in using data is evident in high performing firms across industries, including pharmaceuticals, financial services, hospitality, and consumer packaged goods. And to improve, many firms are creating dedicated data groups, under senior executive leadership, to consolidate, manage, and analyze data and distribute it throughout the organization. Fire-and-Emergency-Plan-Design-Elements-icons-and-software-diagraming-tools-win.png' alt='Engine Building Software Reviews' title='Engine Building Software Reviews' />At Unilever, CMI has taken on this role. For any insights group that serves as a data aggregator, interpreter, and disseminator, the first challenge is to integrate massive and disparate sets of both structured and unstructured data from such sources as product sales figures, spending on media, call center records, and social media monitoring. This may amount to tens of millions of pieces of data. The data sets are customarily owned by different teamssales data by sales, media spending by marketing, customer interactions by customer service, and so on. Working closely with IT, CMI implemented a global marketing information system, accessible to all marketers throughout the company, that integrates data and presents it in consistent formats. This ensures that all users, wherever they reside in the firm, see the same information in the same waywhat CMI calls one version of the truth. Thus if marketing and finance are both looking at first quarter shares of Dove soaps in any market segment, theyre viewing the same numbers and units, derived using the same methodology and displayed in the same manner. Likewise, they see precisely the same picture when they look at data across brands, retailers, or regions. Unilevers global marketing information system has dramatically reduced the debates about data definitions, methodology, and interpretation that led to competing and sometimes wrong conclusions.