If you’re a CFO or a COO, you’re undoubtedly taking a lead role in driving your organisation’s profitability. Every day, you’re making decisions about how to improve business results, find the right commercial opportunities, advance operational efficiencies and reduce costs.

But, making important decisions like these without the right insights is like driving with your eyes closed. The longer you travel without visibility, the shorter your business’ success will be.

It’s no surprise then that intelligent organisations are opening their eyes to the power of big data. They’re collecting and enriching historical and current data, from sources like data centres, cloud solutions and applications, to create a holistic view of their business. Then, they’re using these insights to outwit and outperform their competitors.

Here are seven powerful ways you can do the same:

1. Identify unprofitable customers. Big data can show you your customers’ spend and service history, making it easier for you to target and retain profitable opportunities, and divest unprofitable ones.
2. Enhances customer relations. Big data can help you to understand your customers’ past and present experiences, and enable you to create an optimal customer journey that increases repeat business and minimises loss.
3. Improve supply chains. Big data can help you to identify trends for sales, inventory and operations planning. It can also improve your sourcing, manufacturing, warehousing and transportation models. Not to mention, optimise your point of sale activities. 
4. Reduce marketing costs. Big data can increase the quality of your sales leads, improve your prospecting list accuracy, increase your win rate, and even enhance your engagement strategies, all of which reduce your marketing costs. 
5. Decrease product returns. For many retailers, online shopping is driving a higher rate of product returns. Big data can help you to understand which consumers are most likely to return products, what products they’re likely to return and why. 
6. Boost employee performance. Big data can help you to understand employee KPIs, performance and activities, as well as professional and personal needs (like training and leave requirements), all of which help you to drive productivity and engagement. On top of that, big data can reduce recruitment costs, as it allows you to collect and weight data points to provide the best possible fit for a position. 
7. Minimise supply wastage. Finally, big data can show you where your business is wasting energy and supplies, and help you to make more cost-effective and sustainable purchasing decisions.

Remember, when it comes to driving operational efficiency and cost savings, big data is your big advantage. So, think about which part of your business needs to be more productive, and then ask yourself, are you using big data to make better business decisions?