How is Analytics Transforming Businesses Today?

Technology serves as an enabler for real-time business transformation – analytics technology makes enterprises more agile in the matter of maintaining pace with ever-changing customer needs and business trends. The big data innovators today use analytical tools for high-level forecasting as well as real-time visualization. Businesses that embrace analytics technology transform their business models, and encounter new opportunities for customers, products, revenue streams, and services. From sourcing materials and forecasting demand to the accounting and human resource activities, every aspect of the business can be with analytics.

In one of our previous articles, Solve Common Business Problem with Analytics Solutions - we highlighted the benefits of analytical solutions. Here, we present you how the businesses are transforming after the adoption of analytics technology.

How the Organizations are Using Big Data Analytics?

Big data analytics enables your team to handle and analyze the data, which comes in various forms. In addition to embracing data, the team can employ it to uncover new opportunities and enhance products.

According to the 2018 Global State of Enterprise Analytics Report, 57% of enterprise organizations are utilizing big data and analytics to drive process & cost efficiency as well as change and strategy.

As such, leading enterprises are investing in this technology to drive innovations in collecting new data, combining both external &internal data and use big data analytics to overtake competitors. These leaders don't just embrace analytics solutions and actionable insights, but also take them to the next pace by combining analytics in various ways like:

• Promoting excellent data quality & accessibility
• Making analytics part of each role
• Effectively using analytics tools for business innovations
• Building a quantitative innovation culture

Enterprises using big data and analytics to obtain business insights are achieving the competitive advantage of future success. They are not just using data to enhance core operations but accentuating the organization-wide positive momentum. With reference to the above-mentioned report, the following graph illustrates what they are:

How is Analytics Transforming the Business?

Growing digitization will drive to the formation of new data sources; hence, there will be immense data to the warehouse. The information discovered from the analytics solution can be used in various effective ways to enhance business across industries. Big data analytics supports businesses to reshape their interactions with customers, market products more effectively, and drive more revenue.

According to the recent report, 2018 Global State of Enterprise Analytics Report, 90% of businesses accepted that analytics serves as a key to their enterprise digital transformation initiatives. The adoption of such technologies offers businesses a competitive edge and the competency to encourage a more customer-center approach.

Similarly, the recent McKinsey Analytics Survey states that big data and analytics have changed business practices, especially in sales & marketing, R&D and supply chain management. The following figure illustrates the comprehensive response of the survey:

Properly defined analytics embedded into business process enables vital behaviors for digital transformation, encompassing:

• Increased productivity
• Data-driven decision-making
• Creation of revenue streams
• More competitive services and products
• Increased operational efficiency

Let us dig deep into the various ways that analytics technology can transform the businesses:

1. Transform Customer Relationship

The customer is the crucial asset any business depends on. Observing customer behavior is vital to trigger loyalty. The more data that an enterprise collects &analyzes the more patterns & trends the business can identify. In this current technology age, a business can effortlessly collect the customer data it requires. With the proper data analytics mechanism, a business can derive critical behavior insights that it requires to act on to retain the customer base. In addition, this technology allows enterprises to optimize their service offering and enter their customer service. Thereby this blurs the borders between customers and businesses.

2. Smarter In Decision Making

Big data and analytics can support in major business decisions including planning the expansion of business units and redesigning products. Traditionally, much information lies idle with businesses regarding equipment or asset maintenance, customer base, delivery schedule, and employee payment. Analytics tools can analyze these data and recommend suitable planning action to plot proper decisions. As these tools allow representing the derived insights via dashboards and visualizations, the top decision-makers can easily machinate informed decisions.

3. Better Business Intelligence

By embracing big data analytics, enterprises have enhanced BI procedures as this technology enables better ways of delivering services and products. Before the emergence of analytics, business intelligence was quite limited.

However, the advanced analytics has given rise to BI in today’s business environment as it helps to take the enterprise to the next level. Now it is common to find business intelligence in any business that generates data, and it is hard to find a business that isn’t producing any data at all. With business intelligence, your customer can gain centralized access to the details they required to make data-driven decisions.

4. Embed AI into Big Data and Analytics Technology

The increasing requirements of clients and the normal changes brought by this technology in sales& service channels have dropped existing system puffing for bandwidth while handling tasks. Enterprises are now moving to Artificial Intelligence as well as automation technologies to encounter these new challenges.

The insights gained from the big data analytics solution have supported in marking smart and scalable systems, which can be utilized for automated contextual marketing. According to PwC,59% of executives responded that big data and analytics at their enterprise would be enhanced with artificial intelligence.

5. Reduce Go-To-Market Costs

Nowadays, most organizations depend on Geo-analytical data to concentrate on their go-to-market strategies. Executing this, they're capable of territories, which possess greater sales potential and cut down their go-to-market costs. Geo-analytics supports the businesses to go after targeted audience.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the core area where the influence of data analytics is the most evident. Analytical solutions are playing a crucial role in this circumstance. Marketers are betting bold on social media marketing, SEO, SEM, mobile marketing, and email marketing and consider these strategies are crucial to long-term success.

7. Innovative and Effective Branding Strategies

With analytics, businesses are no longer losses the millions spent in running ads that are not fruitful. Businesses use new techniques like sentiment analysis, text analysis and understand customer traffic data to uncover useful insights of a potential customer.

With more targeted as well as a personalized ad campaign, they can save money by reducing customer acquisition cost and ensure effective branding. In addition, analytics also supports to recognize how a brand innovation is working.

8. Achieve Productivity Breakthroughs

Businesses constantly want to enhance productivity still more. Thanks to the analytics and digital transformation, businesses begin employing four new methodologies to yield productivity breakthroughs. According to Mckinsey, the four structures that fuel the productivity are Zero-based budgeting (ZBB), Digital manufacturing, End-to-end digital enablement, Analytics to value (AtV). The image below explains the structures in detail:

9. Better Product Management

Enterprises today offer tons of different products, and service. It is vital to observe, which are the most popular products. Even this too can vary seasonally and by the region. The insights gained from analytical solutions can ensure the enterprise to target the right product or service at the right time and increase sales.

10. Ensured Risk Management

To remain profitable, businesses are using analytics technology to foresee a potential risk and address it before it occurs. The big data analytics has contributed significantly to the formation of effective risk management solutions. The analytical tools available allow the users to quantify as well as model risks that they encounter every day. Thereby business can enhance the quality of risk management solutions with advanced identification of weaknesses.

11. Create New Revenue Streams

The data analytics in place opens up the possibility for businesses to create new revenue streams with data that is being collected as well as analyzed internally. Once the value of data is uncovered internally, it is simple to apply in a way that could benefit the customers and clients. They can develop new, unique offerings that align with the clients’ desires and needs. If done correctly, analyzing insights from the customer’s data can boost the existing product and discover new revenue streams.

12. Enhanced Use of Technologies

Many technologies and plenty of analytics tools are available to support business with big data analytics. In addition, analytics deriving from big data in compilation with blockchain are slowly being deployed to build more intelligent automation systems, including digital assistants, chatbots, and automated analysts to perform all the analyzes by themselves. Undeniably, the intelligent automation as well as leveraging of IoT drives better business operations and triggers greater digital transformation for businesses.

13. Innovation in Product Development

Another huge transformation in business with analytics is applying innovation in new product development and redesigning of existing products. As mentioned above, this technology has become an opportunity for making additional revenue streams through building product innovation and improvisation. Hence, the products can pertain to the viewpoint of the customers.

14. Transform the Nature of Competition

In addition to transforming business functions, big data and analytics transform the nature of industry competition. With reference to the Mckinsey report, the figure below details the changes in competition.

The most common change accepted by the majority of the respondents is the launching of new data-oriented businesses weakens the traditional business models.

15. Outperform Competitors

The enterprises, which are leading the journey in the analytics revolution feature strong competitive advantage using analytics. The big data analytics technology offers rich insights into critical business improvement, recent sales trends and gaps in the market to address. The unique opportunity to do in-depth market research and access to the rising pool of information creates a notable competitive advantage.

16. Planning For the Future

As analytics offers predictive insights, the enterprise can execute its future plans strategically. The business models incorporate big data to identify discernible market trends and implement business decisions accordingly.

17. Improve Efficiency

Operational efficiency is one of the key indicators of the success of a business. The operational efficiency, in turn, relies on proper planning as well as the execution of those plans. Business can optimize the resources with analytics as it pinpoints where efficiency can be enhanced. Hence, the organization operates more flexible and becomes more agile.

18. Effective Financial Planning

Big data and analytics solutions support administrators to allot funds resourcefully. In addition, companies can use analytics tools to track incorrect payments and fraudulent behavior. Thereby the chances of fraud and embezzlement can be reduced and significantly leads to effective financial planning.

19. Proper Labor Utilization

In addition to information about the customers and trends, analytics can also keep staff’s data. The company can observe staff performance and uncover inefficiencies or any loopholes in its internal system. Based on the insights, they can strategically arrange resources across departments.

Conclusion:

Overall, big data and analytics provide the technology and tools to create a world where there are businesses that produce at their maximum efficiency and source minimum wastage of resources & time. Enterprises that are serious about their business transformation need to make an investment in analytics to realize the advantages of data utilization that drives new internal as well as customer facing strategic edges.