There are several tools to help you analyze your business and its processes. The key is to highlights what impacts your operations positively and negatively because this will help you make strategic decisions. Never just focus on the negative aspect of your business as positive aspects can help you benchmark your company to other companies. It also helps you see what makes your company unique and stand out.
​
Below are three examples of tools we can use to analyze your business and it's strategies.
​
S.W.O.T.
According to this model, there are two forces affecting your company. Internal and external forces. Internally you have Strengths and Weakness and externally you have Opportunities and Threats. If you put these four together they become known as S.W.O.T.. Each force are set into a graph to easily pinpoint key information to analyze. For each force, we find what we do right and wrong to figure out on what the company should work on to increase its performance and its strategy. What ever we find, we make goals and objectives to overcome any obstacles. See figure A as an example.
​
P.E.S.T.E.L.
The PESTEL model (Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Environmental and legal), is a tool to understand what forces impacts your business. All forces of the PESTEL model impacts your business one way or the other. Therefore, when reviewing your financial and non financial data you will use PESTEL to understand the output of the data. As an example, during COVID, companies where forced to shut down due to the pandemic, they where forced to shut down by the government, therefore for political reasons. If we look at our financial statements and we see sales go down during that time, we will understand what caused the dip. As an other example, let's say you can not sell your product without a quality check and a seal of approval from the electrical engineers of Canada, this is a legal force as if someone hurt themselves on your product, you can have legal consequences. So, if we want to have our product shipped as soon as possible, we will find a resource to put that stamp on our product as soon as possible. If for some reason, we can't find that resource, than that explain why our sales may dip during that month due to late shipment of our products. As a last example, let's say you want to build a manufacturing plant on a specific piece of land, but this land is preserved, you will have strict pollution guidelines, these are environmental and legal force. If we look at our financial statements and we see a land but there is missing a plant, is that the environmental impact prevents us from building a plant. We may have additional cost to get a permit to build on the land. If we move forward with the building before we get a permit, you will have legal consequences. You may want to look at the environmental and legal impact first before buying the land.
​
But how do you find information on PESTEL and the external forces of SWOT? The best advice I can give is read the news and follow the news on TV like CNN, follow key people on social media, go to events, do research on your competition by viewing their website to find out what product they sell and how do you compare to those products. Also, follow financial Podcasts, read research papers issued by well known researchers, buy reports from Statistics Canada, use Pinterest, Instagram, Tick Tock, Facebook, You Tube, just be careful of the social media platforms as there is a lot of misinformation. You may want to keep up to date information on the weather it the weather impacts your business. Be informed the way you think get's you the most up to date information as accurate as possible, but be inform that is the key as it will help you explain what force impacts your business and maybe help you change your strategy if need be.
​
RADAR CHARTS
We've discussed analytics affecting your company, now let's discuss analytic tools detailing specific components of your business. To do this we can use a radar chart or a Kiviat diagram. This tool has several names so I will just use radar chart to simplify things as it looks like a radar. Note this type of analysis can be done on anything that can be compared, like a product, a service, employee performance and more. When building a radar chart, you need to select criteria that are vital to this analysis and are important to your reader. To illustrate an example, I will analyze a product. I have selected my criteria based on customers importance through a research done from Statistic Canada. My criteria will be durability, design, quality, functionality and color. I have set up my analysis on a scale of 0 to 5, where 0 is weak and 5 strong. The goal of my analysis is to compare my product to my competitor products using performance criteria to find out where my product stands compared to other products. This will enable me to understand why people buy my product vs other products. See figure C. the result of my analysis. As you can see, product A and B are superior to product C and D. Product B has greater durability and quality compared to other products, while Product A has greater color selection and has a greater functionality than the rest of the products. Knowing that information, I can use it to target my customers or maybe work to increase durability or quality of product A to increase the number of customer that can buy my product. What ever comes out of the analysis, the key is to understand what impacts your analytics so you can implement a strategy.
​
There are way more tools to use analytics, this only an example of what we can look at to help figure out how we can increase performance and efficiency.
​