Make Data-Driven Decisions with Business Analytics
Introduction
Understanding business data is one of the major keys to business success. Business owners who know what to do with their data can use it to understand what their company is doing right and where it needs improvement. With business analytics, leaders find it easier to solve business issues using insight from their analyzed data. In this blog, I am going to talk about the following:
- What is business analytics?
- Why do you need business analytics?
- Types of business analytics.
- Key components of business analytics.
- How your industry can benefit from business analytics.
- How Bold BI helps in business analytics.
What is business analytics?
Business analytics refers to a collection of data analysis practices and services that give companies an accurate picture of their business. Visualizing their metrics gives these companies insight into why things are happening the way they are, and what can be done to improve outcomes. It allows leaders to notice possible flaws or weaknesses in their business and make mitigation plans before costs accrue.
Why do you need business analytics?
Business analytics lets leaders stay updated on the status of their business, quickly identify new business opportunities, and monitor the performance of both of their departments internally and the market trends externally. Incorporating business analytics into the way a company operates results in faster, data-driven decision-making that keeps that company ahead of its competitors and optimized at every level. I will now list more detailed purposes for business analytics.
To promote collaboration
Using analytics in multiple departments in a company leads to better collaboration. Visualization of one team’s metrics makes them easier to explain and understand to other teams. A sales department can present the numbers from the last few months, from which a group of department heads may be able to extrapolate the success of new measures. Bringing multiple departments’ data together in data visuals like charts, though, can make the patterns and conclusions from this data plain. The marketing team can see comparisons of sales to the dates of their marketing campaigns, trainers can see if their workshops improved on issues, and all present can discuss ways to make the outcome forecasted by the analytics program better. Data analytics give employees a clear view of facts, predictions, and market trends, meaning that everyone is starting discussions for improvement on the same page, rather than explaining their department’s vague impressions of the state of things.
To identify new business opportunities
Identifying business opportunities and new markets is one way to keep a step ahead of your competitors and increase your company’s revenue. Business leaders can use analytics to gain insight into customers’ interests and the worldwide trends in their market. Analyzing customer feedback for their own and competitors’ offerings can bring product shortcomings and features gaining popularity to the notice of product designers before competitors notice the buzz. Analyzing the demographics of their customers and comparing that to the feedback could also show the company what changes to make to their products and marketing to interest new demographics. Businesses with a physical presence can analyze geographical data to determine the best places for new branches. A fitness chain can identify neighborhoods with decent income and fewer competitors, for example. A company using their own and their industry’s data can stay one step ahead of their competitors and increase revenue in their company.
To monitor the progress of your employees
Monitoring employee performance data gives you real-time insight into your workforce’s effectiveness. You can identify employees who are having difficulty and require training. You can also keep track of high-performing employees to ensure they are receiving enough challenges and incentives to be satisfied in their jobs. On a group level, managers can observe team members’ performance by type of task, as well, letting them distribute tasks according to employees’ strengths and informing decisions about peer training. Decisions backed by this type of data analysis increase workforce performance in an organization.
Types of business analytics
There are several types of business analytics you should know about.
Descriptive analytics
This type of analytics helps in tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that give an understanding of business progress. It provides insight into past business changes and how they affected the overall performance of a company. With descriptive analytics, you are looking at past data to get a clear picture of your business as it stands. It’s the analytics to start with when you first adopt them and the most common you’ll see in businesses.
Diagnostic analytics
Diagnostic analytics is similar to descriptive analytics in that it looks at past performance. Rather than looking just at how a factor affected a company, it explores why the result was the result. Descriptively, the sales numbers increased significantly at a store in June. Diagnostically, the sales increased because the products were convincingly marketed as holiday items. This analytics allows users to understand how and why events occurred in their company or industry.
Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics is where historical data is analyzed to generate forecasts of future outcomes. Analysts build predictive models to calculate future market trends, growth, expenses, etc. This helps leaders make better business decisions.
Prescriptive analytics
The first three types of analytics build up to prescriptive analytics. Predictive analytics show companies trajectories based on historical data, but prescriptive analytics tells them what to do to change the outcomes. Highly advanced and relatively rare, well-executed prescriptive analytics show what will happen if companies do or don’t take particular actions.
Key components of business analytics
Business analytics has the following components:
- Data mining
- Business analysis
- Visualization
- Predictive analytics
Data mining
Data mining is the process of finding new patterns in enormous amounts of data. It uses machine learning and statistical models to pull out these patterns, as well as rules, which can then be used for further analysis.
Business analysis
Data analysis often involves online analytical processing (OLAP), a technology that allows interested parties to manipulate the prepared data in your data warehouse. The data can be sorted and queried for information relevant to business concerns, performing calculations and presenting metrics to users.
Visualization
This is a component of business analytics where analytics results are represented in widgets like graphs and maps. Appealing visuals present information more effectively to managers, so that they can easily follow and understand results, making it easier to identify patterns.
Predictive analytics
As previously described, this component analyzes a company’s historical data to make predictions about future trends and trajectories.
How your industry can benefit from business analytics
Many industries today benefit from business analytics. It gives company leaders knowledge of goals that were not achieved, what caused any delays, and what can be done to achieve goals in the future. I will now give you a few examples of different industries that can benefit from business analytics:
- Education
- Real estate investment
- Construction
Education
Professionals in the educational industry can use business analytics to determine if there are problems and why, such as if there’s an academic drop in some students in their institution. By looking at aggregated data, teachers will be able to identify students with large discrepancies in results over multiple years more easily. Early intervention can help students get back on track, either through tutoring or counseling. On a larger scale, administration and teaching specialists can see how much progress students make with particular teachers or by entering particular programs, like advanced classes or afterschool tutoring. This can help them plan to expand or phase out those programs, and also inform them as to which teachers do well with certain kinds of learners or learning. If a certain teacher consistently brings students with low reading levels to higher levels than other teachers in the same grade, administrators can see if other teachers can emulate that teacher’s tactics.
Real estate investment
Investors have always been attracted to the real estate market due to the usually reliable profits they receive in return. Worldwide, the demand for real estate is rising at unprecedented levels and its prices are rising with it. Business analytics software can not only map out the most lucrative markets geographically with MLS data but predict the future trends of property values in different neighborhoods. Business analytics helps real estate investors monitor their investments so they have a better idea of when prices are peaking and it might be a good time to sell, when and where rental rates are high enough to make property worth keeping, and which areas may be experiencing temporary price hikes that are not worth buying into.
Construction
In the construction industry, project managers need to know the maximum time needed to produce quality work, the total resources needed for projects, including both nonskilled and skilled labor, and the risks inherent to the projects. Business analytics helps managers determine, for example, whether employees managed time well on previous projects or not, how common it is for the firm’s projects to require more resources than initially estimated, and which resources are being underbudgeted. Examining these metrics helps them make more accurate estimates on how much a project will cost, how many people to hire, and which prospective projects offer the highest ROI.
How Bold BI helps in business analytics
Bold BI allows you to embed analytical and data visualization capabilities into your work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application.
Major features of Bold BI
Data connections
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. Connect to popular relational databases like PostgreSQL and SQL Server; NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Elasticsearch; REST API sources; and big data systems like Hadoop. You can also directly connect to data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
Data preparation
Raw data cannot be analyzed with any sort of accuracy. Bold BI offers data preparation features that make your job easier. It allows you to connect to a vast array of data sources and visually perform actions such as joins and filters. You can preview your data within a visual editor. You can add calculated fields at the data source level with a plethora of expressions. There is also no need to bring all your data into one data store, as you can connect directly with any of them. Licensed Bold BI users can also use the Syncfusion Data Integration Platform for more advanced data preparation.
Data visualization
Bold BI visualizes metrics in the form of interactive dashboards with attractive widgets like charts, grids, and maps. All of a company’s or department’s useful KPIs are displayed in one place in an easily read format, bringing patterns in the data into clear focus.
Collaboration
Collaborative business intelligence in Bold BI lets your whole team look at their metrics and discuss them productively. Post comments and replies right where your metrics are displayed in the analytics interface. Configure emails to be sent to teammates when new comments are posted. You can also share your dashboard securely with a URL.
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. Bold BI generates unique private keys during installation. These private keys are used to encrypt and store sensitive data. Resource access can be configured to use SSL and access to any resource within the Bold BI system requires authentication. Unique permissions can be set up for users and groups that limit their access to data at the row level.
Predictive analytics
With Bold BI, you can display results from predictive models produced using other machine learning environments. Additionally, you can use built-in methods for forecasting to help stakeholders identify business risks and understand trends.
Bold BI’s examples in business analytics
In this section, you will see example dashboards for a few departments and industries:
- Finance
- Information technology support
- Sales
- Property management
Finance
Using a dashboard like this Balance Sheet Dashboard example enables financial managers to monitor the budgetary activities of their company for the past 6 months. It gives them a quick understanding of their expenses and income in different months. With this information, a finance department can see how well their business is performing and areas they could improve on. It helps them determine whether the business is in good financial health, and whether the business is able to achieve its current obligations with its available cash or not. With insights from a dashboard like this, financial department heads can better determine possible financial risks and develop strategies to reduce them in the long run.
IT support
The Bold BI Customer Ticket Traffic Management Dashboard example shows how an IT support department might use a dashboard. By monitoring tickets received and resolved, department heads can accurately estimate the number of tickets their department can resolve within a month. Monitoring metrics such as customer satisfaction ratings and churn rate, they can use the feedback to identify what services met their clients’ needs and the root causes of some customers’ complaints. This improves their understanding of which parts of their products and customer support process need work for the future.
Sales
This Sales Manager Summary Dashboard example shows you how a sales department can integrate their Microsoft Dynamics CRM data into Bold BI to examine their revenue performance over the last six months. A sales manager can quickly see where their department stands, who performs well consistently and who doesn’t, where the company’s products are selling best, and what lead sources require more attention. The dashboard helps managers identify patterns in lost opportunities in order to find solutions.
Property management
Bold BI gathers all the information property owners require such as revenue, total expenses, and loss due to vacancy in this Property Management Dashboard example. The widgets compare these figures at a glance and help owners and managers determine the cause for tenants not renewing their rental leases and whether rents are covering the costs of running and maintaining the properties.
Give it a try
Bold BI helps you seamlessly integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It saves you time and prevents you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create more interactive business analytics dashboards.
Conclusion
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help you optimize your use of your organization’s data. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
For questions, you can contact us 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 June 29, 2022.
