Data Preparation, Data Transformation, and Identifying Business Trends
Introduction
Businesses depend on data to establish baselines and goals to keep them moving forward. This makes data a valuable asset for a company. Therefore, an organization needs to gather the increasing volume of data flowing both internally and externally in different departments and perform analysis to gain information about their brand, employees, or customer behavior to identify changes that need to be made. However, when data is collected from the wrong sources, or when data analysts use dirty data, an organization can formulate incorrect strategies and make poor predictions, leading to a poor customer experience, loss of revenue, and reduced productivity.
Applying data preparation techniques enables efficient data analysis practices, allowing users to eliminate all errors and incomplete information from their data during processing. Let’s learn how data preparation is vital by reviewing the following:
- What data preparation is.
- The importance of data preparation.
- Steps for preparing data in Bold BI.
- Bold BI with data preparation.
- How your industry can benefit from data preparation with Bold BI
What data preparation is
Data preparation is the process of collecting raw data and examining, cleaning, and transforming it to eliminate unwanted or irrelevant information in order to provide high-quality data for further analysis. It allows users to easily derive useful insights from crucial areas in their company to see factors leading to certain changes and identify actions they need to continue and strategies they need to improve.
Importance of data preparation
As a data analyst, you need data preparation to help you use the right data in real-time to make more effective decisions. This will move your organization from its current standing to the level you want, as it enables you to:
- Track frequently reoccurring errors from specific sources of data in your organization to enable you to dig deep into what reduces the quality of data in your department.
- Put your data in a contextual form to enable you to easily understand the information in your data in order to know the improvements you need to make.
- Easily see trends and patterns in your data, enabling you to make the best and quickest predictions and decisions.
Steps for preparing data in Bold BI
The data preparation process involves five stages that advance analytics and data science, putting the information in a place for better standardized analysis. The following stages are the data preparation process in Bold BI:
- Gathering data
- Validating data
- Enriching data
- Loading data
- Verifying data
Gathering data
Know the specific sources from which you want to gather your data, and then analyze and examine data from such sources to enable you to have a true picture of your performance.
Validating data
After gathering data from relevant sources, double-check your analytics to allow you standardize the collected information. This helps you eliminate all errors and inaccuracies that might be contained in your data to enable you provide data that is accurate, clean, and ready to use at all times.
Enriching data
Since raw data cannot directly be used to perform analytics, This helps you increase the efficiency of your business processes to enhance data-driven decisions.
After transforming your data, you need to load it into a storage system, such as a database. This benefits users by allowing them to visualize data from their point of view, speeding up the data preparation process.
Verifying data
Verify your data by checking the accuracy of its results against known metrics. This reveals inconsistencies of integrated data to confirm the of an error, thus increasing trust in your data.
By preparing your data using Bold BI, you can connect to a wider range of data sources and data stores directly to transform your data by renaming, changing column types, formatting columns, filtering, joining, and using expression columns to ensure data utilized in any application is clean and capable of providing reliable output. With the cleansed data, you can make a Bold BI dashboard where you display the data to allow you to easily track metrics and KPIs to monitor growth and progress. This provides quicker data identification that would have gone undetected and would have brought problems to your business. To learn more about data preparation operations supported in Bold BI and how they help harness the power of your data, refer to this blog and our documentation.
Let’s look at some key features of Bold BI that help you prepare data and make actionable decisions.
Bold BI with data preparation
Bold BI is a powerful BI and analytics solution that allows you to glean insights from complex data by visualizing it using a wide range of widgets compatible with hundreds of data sources. This lets you produce quality data within a shorter time, thus speeding up the decision-making process. Its useful features for data preparation include:
Data preparation
Bold BI allows you to combine and transform data from over 130+ data sources, including your preferred data warehouse. It lets you perform visual actions like joins and filters, as well as add calculated fields at the data-source level and preview your data in the visual editor. Also, the Syncfusion data integration platform allows you to perform advanced data preparation.
Data visualization
Bold BI provides 35+ widgets to analyze your data, such as bar graphs, pie charts, tree-map charts, and more. It includes a modern web designer and a viewer to perform analytical operations without writing code. Also included are drilled-down, linked analytics and reports; dashboard templates; custom visualizations; tabbed dashboards; and more. All directly provide analytical information to users in a form you choose. You can visualize your data exactly as needed for the right people.
Data connectivity
For any analytics deployment to be successful, you should be able to connect to all kinds of business data. Bold BI was designed with the latest best practices and makes it easy to connect to data in relational and SQL databases, data warehouses, REST API services, big data systems, and local files. A complete and accurate story requires a complete and accurate basis.
Predictive analytics
Bold BI offers integrated time-series support that helps you recognize seasonal changes and forecast trends in budgeting. It also helps you display results from predictive models produced using other machine-learning environments as well as using built-in methods for forecasting.
Extensibility
Bold BI is customizable and extensible, with a variety of features that are suited for embedding. It has a mobile app and supports authentication protocols, multi-development languages, themes, data-source manipulation APIs, granular permission models, and more.
Data security
With Bold BI, your data is always under your control. For instance, you can keep the entire product and all its data within your private data center or your public cloud account with absolutely no access provided to anyone except you. Row-level security allows you to maintain a single dashboard for all users while limiting access for other users.
Using Bold BI can also help you to easily embed an analytics solution into your daily application with many interactive features such as automated provisioning for tenants and automated provisioning, including users, groups and permissions, single sign-on experience with Office 365, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID integration. You can deploy on Windows, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes, and Azure App Service.
You can collaborate with your colleagues on data analytics within your website or portal. Bold BI’s embedding capabilities include frame embedding, JavaScript embedding, and white-labelling. It enables complete utilization without any expertise or technical requirements.
To learn more about Bold BI and its variety of features, refer to this link.
How your industry can benefit from data preparation with Bold BI
Several industries can benefit from data preparation in different ways. In our real-time use cases, we explain how industries can easily examine their data to gain important information they can rely on in real time using Bold BI’s dashboard examples. In this section, I will give you an overview of how data preparation is benefiting different industries using three examples.
Finance
If you are working in a finance department, you can benefit from data preparation in Bold BI by gathering, combining, and organizing data. This provides accurate information about your investments and business performance from all data sources in your company and stores it in a finance dashboard. Frequent monitoring of this data provides an overview of revenue, income, working capital, assets, and more. This allows you to know whether your company is making profits or not.
Check out this blog and finance department examples to learn more.
Property management
If you are a property owner or manager, you can benefit from data preparation in Bold BI by gathering data on monthly expenses, income, loss due to vacancy, and more. By combining and monitoring this data, a product owner can have quick insight into their property’s revenue performance within a specific month, enabling them to make well-informed, data-driven decisions.
Check this blog and property management department examples for more details.
Government
Data preparation allows government agencies to track and gather education data, transportation safety statistics, and results from public health campaigns. Structuring and organizing these results allow you to explore grant allocations, demographics, and other industry statistics. With this view, you can analyze trends that occur over time and use the results to improve services.
Check this blog and government industry dashboard examples for more details.
Why don’t you give it a try?
I hope now you have a better understanding of data preparation, its significance, its uses, and its advantages.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create interactive data analysis dashboards. You can contact Syncfusion by submitting questions through the Bold BI website, or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on December 22, 2022.
