The ELECTE Review
AI strategy and data intelligence for European SMEs. Each episode distills key insights from ELECTE's research and analysis — covering market shifts, AI adoption, regulatory developments, and the business decisions that matter. Published by ELECTE.
Episodes
60 episodes
Cloud Business Intelligence for SMEs
Cloud BI promises to turn raw data into actionable decisions for SMEs — but only if governance keeps pace with architecture. This episode examines Electe's breakdown of cloud business intelligence: the pipelines and dashboards vendors sell easily,...
Anomaly Detection AI: A 2026 Guide for Business Pros
Anomaly detection AI promises to help businesses spot outliers, cut risk, and act faster in 2026 — but the value depends entirely on how "normal" is defined and how clean the underlying data is. This episode unpacks the core argument of ELECTE's 2...
Promotion Optimization in Retail: How to Lift Profit
Most retail promotions run on habit, not data — and that's a profit leak, not a growth lever. ELECTE breaks down how to plan promotions with data, measure true incremental lift versus cannibalization, and use margin as a hard constraint. AI and te...
Best Inventory Management Software for Small Businesses
Choosing inventory software is a scaling decision, not just an operational one. This episode breaks down features, pricing, and implementation tradeoffs for small businesses, and warns against "best" software lists that assume technical staff most...
Market Basket Analysis: A Practical Guide for 2026
Market basket analysis surfaces which products get bought together using support, confidence, and lift — and AI now runs these calculations continuously across retail and finance data. The Review breaks down the metrics that matter, what the techn...
Resource Allocation Optimization How to Do It Right
Resource allocation without a model is just a guess dressed up as strategy. This episode breaks down a step-by-step framework for optimizing resource allocation with models and metrics, using retail and finance examples to show where misallocated ...
Change Data Capture Explained: A Complete Guide for 2026
Change Data Capture explained: why nightly batch data loads are obsolete, and how log-based vs trigger-based CDC lets businesses track database changes in real time. This guide breaks down both methods, their tradeoffs, and how SMEs use CDC with p...
5 Data Integration Use Cases for Smarter Decisions
Data integration only pays off when it ends in a decision someone owns. Five use cases — sales and inventory sync, unified customer profiles, supplier performance, multi-entity financial consolidation, equipment monitoring — plus the cited outcome...
Monte Carlo Simulation Explained with Examples and Code
More iterations cannot repair bad assumptions: in Monte Carlo simulation, output precision can exceed assumption quality. We work through the article's retailer case, where demand could land between 800 and 1,400 units and the spreadsheet commits ...
Exponential Smoothing Explained from Basics to Forecasts
Exponential smoothing explained step by step, from Simple Exponential Smoothing to Holt and Holt-Winters, with formulas, business examples, and code in R and Python. This episode breaks down when to use each variant and why model selection matters...
ARIMA Models Explained: A Practical Guide to Forecasting
A forecast is only as trustworthy as its diagnostics. ARIMA breaks forecasting into three checkable parts — autoregression, differencing, moving average — but the real discipline is testing residuals before you trust the number. Inventory, demand,...
ELECTRE Method Explained: A Practical Decision Guide
ELECTRE rejects one-number scoring: a cheap supplier with a bad defect rate shouldn't win just because price got enough weight. Built by Bernard Roy in 1964, ELECTRE compares options pair by pair, letting a single unacceptable weakness veto an oth...
Autocorrelation Analysis: A Practical Guide
Time series data rarely behaves independently — autocorrelation reveals how past values shape the present. This episode breaks down ACF and PACF, the two diagnostic tools for spotting hidden dependencies, choosing between autoregressive and mov...
Sanctions Screening Guide: How Compliance Really Works
Sanctions screening isn't broken because it misses names — it's broken because it drowns real hits in false positives. This episode unpacks matching logic, why volume-based "rigor" is a vanity metric, and what risk-based, defensible calibration ac...
Missing Data Imputation: A Business Analytics Guide
Missing data imputation doesn't recover lost information — it manufactures plausible substitutes. This episode breaks down the core methods (mean substitution, regression, multiple imputation) from ELECTE's 2026 business analytics guide, and why t...
Customer Lifetime Value: The Complete Guide for SMBs
Acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 25 times more than keeping one you already have, yet most SMBs still measure success by counting new signups. This episode breaks down a guide to customer lifetime value: the core formula, why margin and chur...
Behavioral Segmentation: What It Is and How to Apply It
Behavioral segmentation groups customers by what they actually do — purchases, browsing, engagement — rather than who they are demographically, and the article argues this produces sharper targeting and higher conversions. Examples from retail, fi...
Mandatory Energy Audit: 2026 Guide
Italy's mandatory energy audit under Legislative Decree 102/2014 hits large companies and energy-intensive businesses, with a new 10 TJ/year threshold and an October 11, 2026 deadline. Thresholds: 250+ employees with 50 million euro revenue or 43 ...
What does follow-up mean: effective strategies for 2026
Follow-up isn't a courtesy — it's the mechanism that decides whether sales leads and projects actually finish. Electe's 2026 guide defines the term and lays out strategies across sales and project management, framing follow-up as a discipline t...
Corporate Data Security: A Practical Guide for SMBs in 2026
SMBs are targeted precisely because they're under-defended, not overlooked. Electe's 2026 guide pairs technical basics — MFA, encrypted backups, patching — with AI-assisted threat detection and staff training into one actionable checklist. The rea...
Sales Data Analysis: The 2026 Profit Guide
A "2026 Profit Guide" claims sales data analysis will sharpen decisions and boost profit, but offers no methodology, metrics, or evidence beyond the pitch. The ELECTE Review examines what's actually being promised versus what's proven, and why a g...
Business intelligence dashboard: the complete guide to 2026
A vendor's "complete guide" to 2026 business intelligence dashboards promises to turn data into decisions — but a dashboard only displays information, it doesn't make choices for you. This episode examines ELECTE's guide to building a BI dashboard...
Artificial Intelligence Video Analytics: A 2026 Guide
AI video analytics promises business efficiency, but every system runs on constant recording and retention of footage from people who never agreed to it. A 2026 guide walks through retail and security use cases while skipping ownership, retention,...
Latin Hypercube Sampling: A Complete Guide for SMBs
Latin Hypercube Sampling beats random Monte Carlo sampling for SMB forecasting by guaranteeing even coverage of outcomes with far fewer samples — but only if your input assumptions are right. This episode breaks down Electe's guide: the method, th...
Microsoft SmartArt: Building Smarter Visuals
SmartArt works — until it doesn't. This episode examines where Microsoft's built-in diagram tool hits its limits and why most teams use it past the point of usefulness. Core argument: ease of use is not the same as effectiveness. Practical guideli...