Business Analytics - An Introduction

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Business Analytics - An Introduction

All organizations, willingly or unwillingly, are accumulating data and transforming them into information - a valuable asset - and exploit this insight to strengthen their core values.  Along with the quality, the quantity - unlike the old times, should allow growing - and the good understanding of the challenge in hand will help enhance the business core values.

What is Business Analytics?

Firstly, we will see what analytics mean. Analytics is the study of data through the analysis of statistics and operations, the formation of predictive models, application of optimization techniques and communication of the generated results to customers, business partners and college executives.

Some people consider Business Intelligence and Business Analysis to be synonyms of each other but in actual they differ greatly. BI centers on gathering data from multiple sources and processing it for analyzation while BA is the inspection of all the information delivered by BI to promote data-driven decisions.

APPLICATIONS OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS:

The business analytics is employed in many sectors of the corporate industry on a day to day basis for a better and much practical understanding. The sectors where business analytics play a pivotal role are:

MARKETING: In marketing, BA has been helping in revealing vital statistics about consumer behavior and market trends.  It also helps companies in identifying their target audience and potential markets for their significant growth.

FINANCE: Business analytics is playing a vital role in this sector too by helping in the process of the vast amount of data to unravel valuable perception on stocks and guide the client about retaining or selling it.

HUMAN RESOURCES: Relevant background checks of the prospective candidates are done by the business analytic tool in the human resource department. The detail information like employee attrition rate, high performance of candidates and other such HR related facts and figures can all be revealed and analyzed with the business analytics tools.

MANUFACTURING: The data offered by business analytics can be used to generate meaningful insights into inventory management, supply chain management, risk mitigation plans and the performance of targets. This helps a company to boost up its operations uniformly in all sectors of its department.

Can Business Analytics Be Used for Personal Purpose?

Business Analytics can be used to implement personal causes as well. Like maybe it can be used to calculate or analyze the household applications or energy consumptions till a certain level. Well, this can be done as one can take care of the amount of consumption going on and based on that a lot of prediction or further calculation can be done as well.

For example, if it is somehow possible to check and calculate the regular consumption of electricity it will soon be possible to trace out a monthly figure for the same. This prediction can help find out the amount of consumption that might be a common figure for the nearby households as well. Similarly, the same logic or procedure can be applied to trace the rate of consumption in the entire local area and then maybe finally it will be possible to make some further estimations for the entire year. Apart from that, it can help one decide how much energy is being conserved and how it can be used for better energy efficiency or for better utilization of energy resources. In fact, this can help improve the utilization of natural and other resources as well.

Can this prediction be taken over for an industrial level?

Well, yes that can be possible to do as well. So, the analysis that is going on the basic level at a particular house can easily be taken over to the next level at an industry. So just by analysis and prediction of this consumption, it can as well be predicted easily whether the work can be tried out at the industry level.

BENEFITS OF BUSINESS ANALYTIC TOOLS:

BA tools help organizations to automate the business processes, make data-driven decisions by providing them with a variety of benefits. These benefits are listed below:

• The tracking and monitoring of business processes are made extremely convenient by business analytics tools. This helps all firms to handle the most challenging business tasks as efficiently as possible.


• The business analytic tools help in achieving accurate and timely predictions about the market conditions by streamlining the market strategies for the optimum outcomes.


• The use of statistical and quantitative analytics helps to get plausible explanations on why some strategies fail while many bear a fruitful outcome. This helps to give a clear idea on what plans to be strategized and implemented for setting the business on the right path to progress.


• The business analytic tools skillfully measure the Key Performances Indicator to help companies in making the best decisions for an organized and all-round growth of the companies.

 

Along with other advanced technologies, business analytics is expanding its growth by serving companies with greater usability and self-service analytics. These tools of business analytics help in the smooth functioning of the otherwise complex analytics and business intelligence workflows so that users can achieve a broader base of business.