120 INTERVIEW Talk to your data Konica Minolta’s Markus Bauten explains how customer feedback, combined with AI insights, helps create solutions that optimise workflows and enhance productivity for small and medium-sized businesses 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, decisionmaking, 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 business solution 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 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-ofthe-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, “ We engage in sparring with customers to jointly explore the opportunities hidden in their data”
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