Discover how Data Warehousing can help you to make better decisions by leveraging the power of business intelligence.
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| Read time: 4 mins
Neil Sherrin, PlotBox VP of Enterprise Sales, North America, explores the applications of data warehousing in harnessing business intelligence for deathcare operators.
I believe that the full potential of a cemetery, crematory or funeral home can be further enhanced by the timely access to, visualization and understanding of the business critical data they hold.
Why? Because more data allows us to see new things, see things better and see things differently.
Business Intelligence (BI) is about leveraging the right data at the right time with the right people in order that they can make informed decisions. Otherwise we’re guessing.
In tapping into new tools like Data Warehousing that enable and support BI, what cemeteries are now learning about their businesses is, frankly, mind-blowing.
So how can your data ‘lift the lid’ on what you understand about your business, customers and future opportunities?
The term “business intelligence” goes all the way back to the 1800s, coined by author Richard Millar Devens, when he cited a banker who collected intelligence on the market before his competitors did [newspapers, industry publications, locations etc].
In the 1950s, IBM explored the potential of using technology to gather BI; through to the 1960s and 70s, when the first data management systems and decision support systems began to store and organize the growing volumes of data.
By the 1990s, BI grew increasingly popular, but the technology was still complex, requiring extensive training to be able to successfully query and analyze the data.
Until now, with the modern era removing those barriers, allowing people like us within the deathcare space to utilize data more easily.
Cemeteries are full of data: deceased records, ownership, inventory, memorial safety inspections, financials, HR…etc.
BI involves a set of technological processes for collecting, managing and analyzing that data to gain insights that inform business strategies and operations.
Why is that important? Because there are multiple assumptions we’re all making about our business right now that are also only partially true.
BI tools enable us to access different types of data - historical and current, third-party and in-house, as well as semistructured data and unstructured data [such as social media - which can be analyzed for insights into how our operation is performing and what it should do next.
Cemeteries can use these insights to improve business decisions, identify problems or issues, spot market trends and find new revenue or business opportunities.
For cemeteries, understanding past and present performance has a number of practical uses - for instance - revenue reports, identifying top selling memorial packages, track maintenance costs or monitor lot availability.
And answering the questions, ‘why’ and, ‘what next’ opens up all sorts of opportunities for predicting future trends and optimizing resources, such as plot inventory - harnessing the power of demand forecasting, pricing optimization, operational efficiencies.
What we’re hearing from cemeteries who’re already using a Data Warehouse is that it offers faster query execution, improved accessibility, and direct BI tool integration such as Power BI.
Furthermore it eliminates the need for manual decryption, local database management, and dependency on a vendor for SQL dumps.
With high data refresh frequency, cemeteries can now amalgamate ALL of their data - from HR and supply chain, to resource management, accounting, social media, online reviews, and you can even use it to digitize paper-based data.
For cemeteries, however, it’s simply not enough to have burial record data in a cemetery management solution, with data separately in HR, in payroll, in ecommerce, CRM etc, because it’s siloed and fragmented.
Lacking in a Data Warehouse to mix, integrate and visualize those data sets and the stories contained within them, that's akin to sitting on a goldmine without a spade to dig with.
Power BI can provide a comprehensive overview of daily operations at a glance - visualizing work orders, appointments, and even spatially displaying burial plots that need attention, as well as a range of pre-baked reports fed from a data warehouse.
Beyond this, it can also provide a deep dive into the rhythms of your facility.
Chapel bookings, function schedules and burial times can be tracked and analyzed for a clear picture of how the facility is being used and where bottlenecks are occurring - invaluable for allocating and planning out resources.
Examining trends over time also offers a powerful look into operational efficiencies in relation to the overall market. For example, illustrating a trend line of no-service cremations, regular cremations, burials, and disinterments over time can prompt a number of critical questions:
What local factors are driving these fluctuations? Are we experiencing operational issues, or resource strain because of them?
Cemeteries are also embracing the ability to answer audit questions more efficiently, such as tracking deferred markers or streamlining data cleanup. Practical applications that will help to keep auditors happy include;
This type of granular insight can help to empower you to assess market influences and adjust your strategies accordingly.
It’s also worth being aware that some Power BI tools have AI built right in. This can be leveraged to carry out ad-hoc analysis. Let’s say for example, we want more information about cremations - we can interact with generative AI within BI tools in a plain text prompt, and ask for a quick chart or graph showing those volumes over time.
Let’s get into a couple of specific examples for cemeteries, starting with problem plots.
Depending on your data, the question you ask might be different, but there are ways to quickly establish which plots may cause you problems:
Example queries…’Which plots have multiple deeds against them? Which plots have multiple contacts associated with them where there is no known relationship between the contacts? Which plots have we received payments for from families with different surnames?’.
Thinking about cremation rates, you might consider…‘How has my cremation rate changed over the last 10 years, year by year (and removing the anomaly of Covid-19)? Based on that trend, what is the expected annual change between now and 2035 for my locality?’.
Now - How does that impact my inventory development? Are our family services people equipped for the change?
At this point, you may be thinking…“We’re not in a position to do that, we’d need people with extraordinary IT capabilities.”.
Well, if you were trying to achieve these outcomes with technology from a different era, you’d be correct. The lift in terms of access to data, frequency of refresh, integration, analysis and so on would be enormous.
But today, BI is accessible, it's mainstream, it's doable!
So, what do we need to create an action plan?
And with very little effort anyone can be using pre-baked Power BI reports that are ready built for cemeteries to use…or go create your own!
Like anything, it’s one step at a time. It’s unrealistic to think we can jump from basic tech adoption [if that’s where you’re at] to the advanced predictive modelling cases we’ve touched on here, that will be a process.
But anyone with electronic data can realistically avail of a truly mind boggling range of reports and insights to unveil what's happening inside their organization today.
If clear reporting, consolidated data, new efficiencies, deeper data insights, faster decision making, increased customer and employee satisfaction are aspirations for your operation then it’s time to look at how you can utilize the power of Data Warehousing and BI!
Want to make better business decisions? Talk to our team today.
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