Differentiation, Efficiency Gains and Value Creation Through Technology

The private equity sector is continuously striving for efficient, high impact diligence for faster deal cycles. Strategy consulting firms which leverage innovative technology to inform data-driven decisions are integral to driving faster turn arounds and higher investment returns for clients.

Through our work, we have seen PE firms face challenges generating, accessing, and consuming imperfect data to inform their investments and portfolio decisions. To address this, Stax designed Rapid Insights, a proprietary technology that allows us to synthesize, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data in short timeframes, enabling consultants to allocate more time toward high-value client needs and to provide cost-effective solutions.

Rapid Insights’ suite of capabilities—built-in data transformations, descriptive analytics, and data visualization—simplifies the process of dissecting target or portfolio company performance at any given time, supporting Stax engagements across the investment lifecycle:

• Buy-side Diligence (deal screening): Rapid Insights in combination with our commercial due diligence can significantly reduce evaluation timelines and provide in-depth initial insights into target performance. 
• Portfolio Performance: Rapid Insights enables PE firms to monitor and measure performance and growth of portfolio companies during the hold period, provides a unified view of performance across portfolio companies, and informs decisions to improve portfolio operations and optimize exit planning. 
• Portfolio Company Value Creation: Rapid Insights informs data-driven decision making from the Board-level to the Management-level, providing insights into the optimization and maximization of value creation.

More specifically, Stax Rapid Insights features pre-built, specialized views of the critical data and insights into target and portfolio company performance, customer, and products:

• Overall: Includes key metrics such as revenue, gross profit, customer counts, volume, and average ticket price in time series view. Performance for the previous 12 months is also provided for overall monitoring. 
• Customer: Drilldowns into customer composition, providing new/repeat customer splits and customer retention and churn cycles. 
• Product performance: Visibility into product performance by category and SKU. 
• Self-service analytics: Access to customizable insights and underlying data for self-service exploration.

Rapid Insights’ distinctive and versatile design allows it to be implemented by utilizing something as simple as a CSV extract of a Transactional Database File/Order Database File of a target/portfolio company. Even if there are multiple ERP or other technology systems in a given company with different database structures, Stax’s can transform raw files from each system using inbuilt capabilities from Rapid Insights, forming an aggregated data model without hassle.

At Stax, we continuously strive to empower PE firms to make data-driven decisions through our buy-side commercial due diligence, portfolio value creation, and exit planning engagements. Rapid Insights is another example of where and how we drive superior outcomes and support highly informed decisions for our Private Equity clients.

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