Keeping your company at the forefront of its field means having the ability and confidence to make hard-fast decisions. Success depends heavily on making the right decisions and executing them with speed and efficiency, giving you a serious competitive advantage over the market.

EY conducted a survey that revealed 81% of senior executives indicated they needed to improve their decision making speed and get greater insight on their business. They also recognised that their team made too many decisions based on intuition, and wasted time working on mechanical tasks and unnecessary detail.

The process of remaking decisions wastes a considerable amount of time. There is an art to making good decisions the first time. 

Piyanka Jain (prior head of business analytics at Paypal North America), used a 5-step process when faced with making tough business decisions:

1. Keep in mind the most important business question
2. Create an analysis plan with hypotheses
3. Collect data and identify insights
4. Discuss and gather input from your team
5. Set up a plan based on your decision and execute

Some decisions are more complicated or important than others and need to be given greater thought.  Whatever the decision being made, the decision makers should be able to assess the past, current, and future trends with ease and come to a timely decision.

The most reliable way of doing this is to gather and consult data before making any proposals. Data can provide big insights that answer whatever questions are being asked -; ‘Are we engaging with customers?’; ‘How can we reduce business costs?’, ‘What can we do to improve customer satisfaction?’. 

Advanced analytic systems are extremely effective in supporting data-driven decision making. By collecting and storing data, colleagues from every level of an organisation can view reports and easily access facts, statistics and insights upon which to base their decisions. These automated systems can also analyse the data for you, presenting it in the form of appealing visuals, so it is easy to read and identify trends and patterns.

Using the right application speeds up the entire process of decision-making, increasing the efficiency and productivity of your team, enabling better decisions and leading to a smooth execution of the plan.