By Laura Hyde |
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often possess a wealth of data, which has untapped insights offering enormous potential for improving operations, decision-making, customer service and understanding, and strategies for long-term success.
Konica Minolta’s Business Transformation Services (BTS) empower SMBs to unlock the hidden value within their data. By turning untapped insights into actionable intelligence, these services help businesses improve operations, strengthen decision-making, enhance customer experiences, and build strategies for sustainable long-term success. BTS is a modular, preconfigured data warehouse, designed to work within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem and act as a central hub for data integration and automation.
“The real strength of our Microsoft-powered solutions lies in their speed and simplicity,” says Markus Bauten, manager of business solutions at Konica Minolta. “When working with new customers, we typically begin with a kick-off meeting to discuss their requirements and complete administrative tasks such as gaining access to company databases. We then seamlessly integrate internal and external data sources into the central platform. Everything is more or less automatic; it usually takes three to five hours to copy the data to the data warehouse, but once that is complete, testing can begin.
“We provide videos and guidance to customers to aid testing, which is usually a two-week period, then we check in to determine if everything is performing as expected. This is when we customise the solution to suit the individual needs of the organisation. Finally, we provide training in how to use Microsoft solutions like Copilot and Power BI. This ensures every member of the organisation knows how to use the new technology, which works with Microsoft products they are generally already familiar with, such as Excel.”
Konica Minolta’s Business Transformation Suite (BTS) enables SMBs to streamline data management, optimise workflows, enhance productivity and making better decisions
Konica Minolta is able to focus on developing and refining solutions for new Microsoft technologies, guided by real-world customer needs.
“Microsoft is an innovation driver and at Konica Minolta our goal is to deliver out-of-the-box innovation to the mid-market, so we’re happy to be its partner,” says Bauten. “We’re always happy to test Microsoft’s new tools and technologies, but we don’t develop anything without first consulting our customers, a peer group of around five or 10 companies who have worked with us for a long time. When any new Microsoft technology is launched, we engage in sparring with customers to jointly explore the opportunities hidden in their data. Together, we transform insights into tangible value – improving operations, enabling confident decision-making, enriching customer experiences, and shaping strategies for lasting success.”
Konica Minolta also generates ideas from customers’ everyday problems, adds Bauten. “Obviously, some of these are individual and bespoke, but some crop up repeatedly, leading us to develop a wider solution from which we can create a standard to deliver to all our customers.”
This real-world customer feedback is creating new possibilities for Konica Minolta’s AI tools, which Bauten believes is central to the next stage of value creation. “At the moment, we’re strongly focusing on Microsoft Copilot and the possibilities it offers,” he says. “Customers are enjoying being able to interact with AI and ask it questions about the information contained within their data, but the next step, besides improving data processes and making them faster, will be sparring with it. So, AI will progress from answering questions like ‘What was the best performing product?’ to responding to open-ended queries such as ‘How can we improve X, Y or Z?’. It will also make suggestions and generate ideas for the organisation. While these capabilities are available to some degree now, they are not accurate enough from a standard point of view.
“Our speciality is insights and reporting, so we’ll focus on integrating AI tools, such as Copilot, into our solutions to enable decision makers to work faster and more efficiently in the future.”
Discover insights from these partners and more in the Autumn 2025 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox.