Why use Elara
Using the Elara platform provides advantages to both businesses and the developers delivering solutions for said businesses. In this lesson a use case business problem and solution will be defined for a fictitious small business, to demonstrate why a business might want to use Elara platform.
Example Use Case
Context
To set the scene, Frank Furter is a small business owner that proudly operates a hot dog cart in a busy city area, called "The Hot Dog Cart". Frank is fully responsible for the whole business, this ranges from ordering the ingredients, rostering staff (himself and one other employee), through to operating the hot dog stand, including selling the hot dogs.
Currently Frank uses an ordering system which manages ordering sausages from suppliers, and a point-of-sale system which records sales and facilitates payment, and a system that manages rosters. Frank orders sausages from two different suppliers, who charge different amounts, and have different delivery lead times. Sometimes Frank gives different discounts, anecdotally it seems like the discount affects how much he sells, but he doesn't understand the effect. His employee (and himself) work under a standard award and so have restrictions on work hours, as well as penalty rates.
Frank is convinced that he could be making more profit, but he doesn't know how.
Problem
Frank explains that while he has great systems for managing ordering, rosters and sales, he doesn't know how to use that data in a business context to increase his profit. More specifically, he doesn't know how to use the data to maximize his profit through the three type of decisions that he has control over:
- which supplier should he order his sausages from?
- what discount should he provide to his customers?
- how should him and his employee be rostered?
Frank's primary problem is not knowing how to make his ordering, discount and rostering decisions in a way that will lead to the maximum profit. His secondary problem is that he doesn't have a way to take the data from his systems and understand what his future profit will look like, what will affect his future profit, or even how much better (or worse) his future profit could actually be.
Solution
The ideal outcome for Frank is to have a solution that takes into account the continuous feed of his ordering and sales data, and then tells him how to make decisions to achieve the maximum possible profit. More specifically, the solution should precisely address Frank's three key decisions by prescribing how much to discount, how to roster, and who to order from to achieve maximum profit. Also, it would be useful to Frank if the solution could tell him what his future profit is likely to be, and how much better (or worse) it could be based on the decisions he makes.
As a developer, you are able to use the Elara platform to build the aforementioned solution to solve Frank's problems and maximize his profit. The video below shows such a solution, which you will build in subsequent courses.
Benefit
By prescribing what discount to provide to customers, how to roster, and which supplier to order from on each day, the solution would allow Frank to effortlessly operate his business and achieve double the profit for "The Hot Dog Cart"! Furthermore, the solution would allow Frank to understand how much better or worse his profit would be if he deviated from the "optimal" ordering and discount decisions.
Aside from the obvious benefit to Frank, as a developer you would have rapidly built a digital solution from the available data that can create measurable business value. And secondly, you will have defined your solution in a way where you could easily re-use and re-apply to many other businesses!
Next steps
The Elara platform can extend the same types of benefits to any business, and any decisions, empowering developers to create reusable software solutions to create measure-able business improvement. The resulting solutions unlock the ability for said businesses to effortlessly achieve their full potential.
Now that you understand the benefits of the Elara platform at a high-level, continue to the next tutorial to understand how to use the Elara platform.