Business Analytics
WHAT IS BUSINESS
ANALYTICS?
"Data is the new oil". As in the last century, oil was the most important resource for every business. Oil has now been symbolically replaced by data as the most valuable resource.
Business analytics is the process of using quantitative methods to derive meaning from data to make informed business decisions. Today’s businesses create diverse sets from myriad sources.
Business analytics analyzes past business performance and results and uses the insights from this analysis to prepare for increasing future business performance. Business analytics is the creation of different models, running the data, mapping it to future goals providing a roadmap.
Do you want to know how business analytics can help you optimize your business processes and drive innovation, growth, and excellence across your organization?
Know that the digital age would not be what it is without business analytics. Now,
what makes business analytics significant in the digital age?
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To Make Informed Decisions
To begin, business analytics is a crucial tool for making informed decisions.
It’s no surprise that companies that use business analytics to guide decision-making are better positioned for sustainable growth. There’s a good chance that such data-driven decisions will help your business streamline operations, improve profitability, expand market share, reduce costs, and deliver a more significant return to potential shareholders.
Know that the digital age would not be what it is without business analytics. Now, what makes business analytics significant in the digital age?
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To Understand How Your Competitors Are Doing
Successful businesses use competitor analysis. Business analytics collects who, where, when, and what about business rivals. It entails recognizing competitors, understanding their objectives, strategies, strengths, vulnerabilities, and who to target and who not to.
Analyzing your data will show you how your company stacks up against the competition and help you develop strategies to outpace and outlast them.
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To Improve And Adjust Marketing Efforts
You can look back at previous marketing campaigns to see what worked and what didn’t. In addition, if the results aren’t impressive, you can go back to the drawing board and come up with more customer-focused marketing methods. You see, the options are practically limitless.
Business analytics tools can give you insight into how your audience has interacted with your content in the past. Your website or app can be analyzed to find out how users found it and how they engaged with it. This enables you to use data to improve the user experience.
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To Gain Insights For Product Development
Businesses that provide products or services rely heavily on customer data to figure out what to do next. The number of people who might buy something from an online retailer can be huge. In order to determine what items and services will appeal to different groups, they use demographic data, historical purchase data, and even payment information.
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To improve Human Resources
Labor is the engine that drives every organization. HR plays a vital role is keeping this engine strong and running. For them, understand the hiring patterns, reasons for attrition, monitoring employee performance, motivational factors, deciding on incentives, perks are some of the analytics that provides insights into the recruit-to-retire cycle.
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To Improve Customer Experience
Analytics helps businesses retain their customers. They can analyze customer purchases, what’s in their cart, and how often they shop.
An eCommerce shop can optimize the performance of its web pages based on the collected data. Something as simple as generating a notification of the items the customer has added to their cart but hasn’t yet purchased can be effective. And so is remarketing other products similar to those that the customer purchased in the past. Ultimately, this improves customer satisfaction and trust.
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To Optimize Operations
In manufacturing organizations, operational optimization is key to success and profitability. Analyzing trends like OEE (overall equipment efficiency), predictive equipment maintenance, predictive warranty claims, and streamlining the production flow are some of the analytics that can help.
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To Better Manage Finance
A myriad of data exists in the world of finance. Some of the analytics that can help every company are Optimization of cash flow; predicting organizational requirements for growth; eliminating risk and monitoring compliances; detecting frauds and default of payments as a predictive measure; effective utilization of funds.
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Supply chain
Business analytics in the supply chain process means effectively studying the supply chain mechanism and reducing the in-efficiencies of logistics systems. It allows one to take decisions of demand-planning, better managing of inventory, reducing inventory carrying costs, shipment damages, improving accuracy of delivery systems etc.
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To Organize Strategic Review
Another benefit of business analytics pertains to strategic review. It’s an invaluable tool for evaluating operational matters, such as human resource management, finance, and product management. In addition, it can help your business prepare for unexpected events.
Furthermore, it models sales, revenue, and other critical data to estimate future trends. This allows businesses to see yearly, seasonal, or other changes and plan ahead. All these contribute to improving the productivity of business operations, thus driving growth.
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Procurement & Sourcing
Analytics allows users to monitor suppler performance, demand vs supply analysis, elimination of supply chain problems & analyzing spend patterns.
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Sales
Analytics in sales analyzes leads vs conversion, effectively track sales performance, understand the deficiencies to train the team well enough to generate more customer effective sales strategies, analyzing service support, customer insights etc.
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To Identify Fraudulent Transactions
In any field, fraud can have a significant financial impact. Organizations can use data and analytics to uncover patterns that indicate suspicious behavior, thereby reducing fraud and deterring criminals.
For instance, big data can help retailers create customer profiles and set limits for how often a typical customer buys a specific product over time. Once a baseline has been set, retailers can look for customers whose actions suggest they may be trying to cheat the system. The stores can then put these customers on a ‘black list’ or implement safety measures to help stop fraud.
In a nutshell, the following are the reasons why business
analytics is vital, irrespective of the sector
Provide access to real- time data
Creates actionable insights
Optimizes customer experience
Defines your position in the market
Business Analytics is important to every organization and can benefit every department within the organization. A few sample cases where analytics can help improve the department and organizational performance are:
SUMMARY
The need for business analytics across global industries is ever-growing. Business analytics is helping organizations keep their product offerings relevant, maximize reach, discover new business opportunities, pre-empt bottlenecks, prepare for adversities, and tap into new revenue streams. Business analytics is also enabling organizations to provide optimized solutions to their customers, thus enhancing customer experience and loyalty.