The business environment is rapidly evolving with Industry 4.0 and the progression of the digital technologies. Also evolving is the pace at which data is being generated. Effective Analytics have become essential tools to assist companies with increasing efficiency, productivity, and revenue. As a result, business analytics is coming to the forefront, fostering business growth, functioning as a vital cornerstone for assessing historical events, and influencing the organization’s future.
Business analytics provides deep insights to business heads and leaders for aligning their business strategies. Data-driven companies that have invested in analytics as a pivotal growth strategy are better equipped to understand the day-to-day functioning of their organizations, and identify efficiencies that can be realized by an effective analysis of real time data.
While some organizations fear that setting up an effective analytics process is a long journey –with years spent in gathering data, setting up appropriate technologies, building the necessary skills, and embedding analytical decision-making into key organizational processes – the Return on Investment (ROI) is definitely worth the effort.
How analytics is driving business decisions
As legacy business models are being broken down, Analytics and Big Data management are becoming major influencers in decision making, irrespective of the size of the business. In fact, a study by McKinsey shows that data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable due to data-driven analytics[1]. Statistics[2] show thatglobal big data market size is expected to grow from US$ 138.9 billion in 2020 to US$ 229.4 billion by 2025. While large enterprises would continue to hold a bigger chunk in this segment, the SMEs increasingly turning to big data implementation for faster business decisions.
Analytics is shaping the competitive landscape with industry leaders utilizing it to increase revenues, penetrate new markets, change the nature of their relationship with customers, and increase efficacies.
Companies have access to different types of data flowing in from multiple sources including websites, business apps, social media pages, mobile devices, documents, archives, and many more. However, the challenge lies in analyzing and transforming the collated data into value-added structured data and draw valuable insights from it. Business decisions backed by metrics, facts, or figures related to organizational goals or initiatives help in establishing a stable backbone for their management reports and business operations.
Innovative techniques and advanced analytics solutions can help maximize scalability, speed and cost; provide optimal processing and storage for real-time data, covers a wide range of application data, from structured tabular data to raw data in images, videos, emails, spreadsheets and social media conversations.
Companies also rely on Predictive Analytics based solutions for analysing present and historical data with the help of data mining, predictive modelling, and machine learning tools. This helps companies to forecast customer churns and pain points, identify trends, strategize tactics to increase customer lifetime value and formulate forward looking strategic business decisions.
How should a company choose the best analytical tool for their business?
For companies, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), it is essential to understand the impact that adopting data analytics solutions can generate to gain insights into their business, as well as to automate manual processes.
For an analytics project to be successful, it is very important to understand the business case and the results that it can help to drive. It is important to understand the solutions that are working well for the SME segment of the market, and to understand the impact these can have on an organization. In this, choice of the right software, a skilled team and fit with the existing IT infrastructure all contribute to a successful analytics implementation.
Technology experts help businesses in identifying inefficiencies that would reduce costs by providing intuitive analytical solutions that generate comprehensive, accurate, and actionable reports from the varied data that companies today have access to. Companies such as Saberpoint that have a a well rounded analytics portfolio are well positioned to leverage and streamline client data sets to give companies a single source of truth for their decision making.
[1] https://www.mybusiness.com.au/management/5648-how-business-analytics-can-influence-decision-making
[2] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/big-data.asp
