Lotus Analytics: The Essential Analytical Arsenal

Ash Anand, CEO

Putting plans and ideas into practice have always kept Ash Anand, the industry expert, excited. Having witnessed the struggle of many professionals who try to ace the different areas of business management, Anand came up with a plan to put an end to the inherent challenges. The intent was to allow people focus on their core area of expertise and relieve them of the worries of other business aspects. Anand’s venture, Lotus Analytics, fills in the skills and expertise gap for the enterprises in various industries. The company is focused on identifying business challenges and subsequently architecting solutions that cater to the needs of the various facets of each business in any business sector, whether it is Logistics, finance, HR, inventory, IT Services, professional services and various others including fraud prevention. Lotus Analytics focuses on empowering businesses to invest their efforts in what they are best at, all while saving cost and increasing revenue. In this interview with CIO Applications, Ash Anand, CEO, explains how their solutions and services are enabling businesses with analytical capabilities.

What are the typical challenges that you have witnessed in the verticals that you cater to?

Many companies still use legacy technology and approach for business execution. The challenges for these companies are to embrace change and transition without making a huge investment. We bring to bear our rich experience of analyzing and improving business performance for a wide variety of companies (large and small) over the years. Using this experience and knowledge, we educate business leaders and help them implement the right solutions at the right time.

There are many talented and brilliant business leaders who know exactly how to take their company to the next level, but often, they are faced with one of the most common obstacles facing all of us today and that is lack of time. In the ever-pressing, fast-paced global business environment, competition is always knocking at the door. To stay ahead of the curve, leaders must spend their time doing what they do best and eliminate time spent on activities that can be taken care of by a team of qualified experts. We reduce the opportunity cost of business leaders’ time by eradicating tasks from their to-do lists and executing processes that deliver high-quality results.

Give us a detailed overview of services and solutions that you provide.

What sets us apart from other analytics and managed service providers is our wide variety of service-driven solutions that are customizable to meet our client partners’ specific needs. No two businesses are exactly alike, and no two of our products are leveraged the same way across the spectrum. Our portfolio of products allows business leaders the flexibility to utilize custom-tailored services and solutions that are constantly evolving to give our clients an edge over competitors.

Beneath one umbrella, our services are leveraged to touch every point of a business across a variety of verticals.

We bring to bear our rich experience in analyzing the business performance of several companies over the years to continuously educate business leaders and owners to implement solutions for the right employee groups at the right time

For more than a decade, our clients have relied on our services in the areas of: data management and analytics, accounting and finance, HR processes, compliance, customer engagement, sales productivity, end-to-end supply chain management (including reverse logistics), accounts and commission reconciliation, process engineering and outsourcing, professional consulting, loss prevention, POS database set-up and maintenance, business acceleration services, and custom software development.

We develop, manage, and service custom workflows for the wide variety of processes and actions taken that contribute to a successful business. From there, we gather incredible amounts of data to create actionable insights that highlight areas of success and opportunity. The utility of our services can be highlighted by defining a single use case at a macro level. Think about any business that interacts with a customer face-to-face. By analyzing historical data, our tools will forecast customer traffic trends, suggest staffing levels based on past and forecasted performance, provide the management team with sales targets, and even generate leads to be contacted during down time. Customer engagement and operational compliance is maximized by leveraging our virtual store audit solution that identifies areas of concern and automatically assigns tasks to employees for prompt action and resolution. As information comes in to our secure data warehouse, every line item is analyzed and audited for compliance. Meanwhile, a long list of back-end processes, such as inventory ordering, reconciliation, accounts management, POS software optimization, and other defined tasks are being completed. With an in-depth understanding of the entire business model, our finance experts monitor daily accounts activity and immediately report cash shortages, inventory losses, income discrepancies, etc. Business acceleration occurs regularly as our department heads meet with each client’s executive team to review financial statements, outline areas of opportunity, and suggest how various processes or solutions can be optimized for better performance. Meanwhile, our Intelligence team is engaged in constant R&D efforts to prepare us and our client partners for the future.

Could you share a customer success story that highlights how you help the clients?

Many of our partners have some staggering growth stories over the years in many different scenarios. The strategy of growth is the operating standard for the partnership we nurture, ever since we on board a new client, leading through many phases of change, streamlining processes, excellence in management and new ideas to do both – grow while streamlining expenses and operating costs.

One specific example that comes to mind—Almost six years ago, one of our partners that started with us had a mindset of growth but did not have a plan and the recipe of the completely structured theory. We have worked with them in almost every aspect of their Telecommunication Retail business, and we worked with them to optimize their store, operations, finance, risk and many such other management tools and processes, and by doing so effectively together, we were able to move onto the path of continuous growth. We worked together and created a growth plan for the partner and after implementing our solutions and services, this partner was able to fine-tune all their operations and grow by 15 times in six years. Today, they have more than 200 operational outlets, and that makes us Proud.

There are numerous companies in the analytics space, what are the differentiating factors that make you stand out?

Quality, uniqueness, constantly evolving are a few of the many reasonings why our clients have continued to remain associated and excited with us and that is a testimony to our value proposition. Secondly, it is our commitment to offer new and creative professional solutions to business problems faced by entrepreneur community. The clients perceive us as their own counsel, coach and a close ally to be able to make the right and educated decisions. Going ahead, we are very close to launch as we are constantly in the planning phase and almost there to be able to set our footprint in Canada and in the UK Markets. We will provide local support by being in those places.