The role played by analytics is limitless and also very necessary to make logical decisions for any contemporary or existing attempt. Analytics is where, on the basis of past or historical data available, we analyse it and try to predict the futuristic trends and effective decisions that directly contribute to the organization’s growth. Analytics plays an important active role in business, like in every other sector. Analysts across various phases of business go through statistical methods, mathematical operations, and software programmes aiming to provide prescriptive and predictive resolution, which helps in minimising errors, increasing efficiency, and also effective decision-making and planning capabilities.

In the present day, there is a lot of significance in using business analytics to emerge and advance. Applications of business analytics are really abundant in nature and also spread widely across various sectors. This particular article will provide you with important applications, uses, and examples of business analytics in various sectors.

Applications

Involving or including business analytics in our business makes us have power over the informed decisions that we make. It also brings a lot of changes in terms of product development and service delivery. Business analytics is being blended with the processing tools that answer a lot of questions that specify “WHY?” and develop futuristic actionable items. In each and every business function like finance, marketing, human resources, etc., we can apply business analytics on a real-time basis, which in turn helps us in making decisions like customer segmentation, target customers, budget planning, etc.

Social media companies understand the patterns of their customers’ preferences through the activity of their customers on social media platforms to which they have subscribed. Not only for major functions that business analytics can be applied to, but it also holds good for other verticals like manufacturing, CRM, etc.

Finance: Business analytics is really a great boon for the finance sector. Financial planning, portfolio management, investment banking, budgeting and forecasting divisions gets lot advantage after implementing business analytics with their business process. The business analyst makes use of statistics and data mining tools on the set of available data to predict the trends of products and identify futuristic actions for the existing products.

Product Marketing: The product marketing strategy to be adopted also depends on business analytics nowadays. From the very beginning of the sales and marketing process, business analysts start analysing consumer behaviour, patterns of buying, techniques of advertising etc.

HR professionals: Analytics in the HR field helps us to analyse and identify the right candidate for the right job. The other factors, like retention rate and salary expectations of the candidates, can also be determined by using business analytics.

CRM: To maintain healthy relationship with client’s business analytics helps in determining KPI’S like buying patterns, lifestyles and status of their customer base.

Manufacturing: Even to improve efficiency in production or manufacturing of products, business analytics helps a lot in various areas of production or manufacturing, like procurement, SCM, inventory and risk management, etc.

Credit card services: Business analytics helps companies to identify potential customers to offer credit cards by identifying and analysing important data like customer credit scores, investment patterns, etc.

Now, let us explore some real-time examples of business analytics.

OTT platforms base their services on the movies and series we watch; they suggest the right movies and series. Also, e-tailors will suggest similar products on their e-commerce platforms related to our searches made on their portal previously.

Organizations rely on data nowadays a lot to improve and boost their operations in terms of business. If these are utilised in a proper manner, then business analytics acts as a prominent tool to strengthen and build businesses. Business analytics is used in all the phases of both the product and service lifecycles of an organization.

At the very beginning stage, these tools were used to collect qualitative and quantitative data about a product with the goal of conducting and handling market research.

Statistical tools as well as advanced analytics are used to analyse gathered market metrics, to define and determine new products and their features, and also to identify trends and hidden patterns.

Later, the analyst distributes or shares the insights with relevant business stakeholders using interactive tools such as reports and dashboards.

They give us all the necessary thesis and analysis to predict the future path of the product and support us in building a successful product strategy.

To have consistency in the business we run, we have to be aware of the latest and changing trends, which we get from the analysts.

Business analytics supports and helps a lot in building our business. It can also be used across all the phases of business. We can utilise business analytics and relevant tools to build, grow, create strategies, analyse trends and also stay updated with present trends.

RAGHAVENDRA P V
I MBA, DSCE